Hello World, pt II.

 Now, where was I? 

Ah yes, we'd headed off to the ER at Surrey Memorial. I was there for about two weeks. On or about June 18th, I was placed in a PATH facility for rehab. Care Life rehab residence in Fleetwood. 

After my first day at Care Life, I had a massive pulmonary embolism. Strike one. People  die all the time in care facilities. Accidentally. So when I tilted my bed back after dinner my first day. I immediately noticed the weight on my chest. I reached for the bed buzzer and pressed it. 

Item 1: this was sudden and unmistakable. This did not fool me into thinking it was just indigestion; and then kill me in my sleep later.

Item 2: those of you who have been hospitalized for an extended time know that you can never find those bed buzzers when you need them. Even when you can find them, they don't work, and even when they do work, there's no one at the nurse's station to answer. 

Lucky me. The buzzer was right there in reach, it worked, a nurse answered right away, and I told her I was having a Cardiac Episode, and she called 911 right away. I was delivered back to the ER  -- in 30 minutes or less. Sometimes the system works! 

The Embolism came about from lots of damaged vascular tissue in my lower legs. They broke up into clots, and those clots wound up getting stuck in the plumbing of my heart and lungs. Those who have read the post previous to this one will not be surprised. The ICU tried iv medication to clear the blockage, but to no avail. Next; they proposed a manual thrombectomy. You remember that wound in my groin? The one I was told was when they nicked my femoral artery while removing my iv mainline? There may be another explanation for that; that was the entry point for the thrombectomy.

I'm relying a lot on Kath's memory of events from here.

Apparently, the procedure went okay, they cleared out the blockage. But I wasn't recovering as anticipated. Sometime around June 21st, I fell into a coma. I'll pick this up tomorrow.