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Tag: central line

Side By Side With a Handsome Stranger

Six months after my admission to Hell-crest Commons I was finally preparing to leave.  I wasn’t going home.  My relationship with my parents had changed completely.  But I was preparing to leave.  My feelings about the situation were very mixed, but I was very happy that I would no longer be living on a medically complex floor of a nursing home.  No matter how nice and buddy-buddy Jillian the nurse practitioner at Hell-crest Commons had tried to become with me, I would never be comfortable with her.  Not after everything she had put me through.

However on Monday, the day before my official discharge date, she found me in my room early in the morning and pulled me into her office.

“Can you transfer yourself into that crappy nursing home wheelchair and meet me in my office?” she had asked me.

“Sure,” I had told her, assuming she was just … Find Out What Happens Next

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A Trip to the Edge of Life

Living at Hell-Crest Commons was a nightmare. After a three-month-long hospital stay at my local hospital for a flare up of my autoimmune-mediated small fiber autonomic poly neuropathy (that was getting worse and worse every few months) I had gotten really deconditioned.

“You need a whole lot of PT and OT to get you back to a point where you can function at home and in the community,” the doctor and case manger both had explained to me months ago. My impression of the situation was that I was going to Hillcrest Commons for a few months for therapy and then going back home.

After three months at the nursing home, we had a big meeting and they dropped a bombshell on me. My parents weren’t going to let me come home. They didn’t want to take care of me anymore because they wanted their ffreedom. I was a burden … Find Out What Happens Next

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Being too Sick to be Crazy

A meltdown in my room of Hell-Crest Commons, the nursing home I’d been living in for three months, had prompted that awful nurse practitioner, to send me to the hospital to get evaluated by psych crisis. Jillian was my primary care provider at the nursing home.

Who wouldn’t have had a meltdown after that meeting though? At the meeting they told me that I was faking all of my illness because I liked being sick and that she was going to stop my IV fluids. My IV fluids were keeping me alive. They were one of my main treatments, but that wasn’t even the worst part of the meeting.

At the meeting they had dropped the bomb on me that I was never allowed to go back to living at home.

After the meeting I went back to my room where I couldn’t stop crying. Tanya the social worker, and … Find Out What Happens Next

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Being Thrown a Life Preserver

The crazy primary care provider at Hell-crest Commons, the nursing home I had been living at for a little over three months was in the process of killing me. She was trying to wean me off of my life-sustaining IV fluid infusions that I ran all day and night through my port-a-cath in my right chest. Over the last two weeks I had been weaned from 2 liters too 1.25 liters and each drop made me sicker and sicker.

Three days after Jillian took me down from 1.5 liters of my special combination of IV saline, potassium, dextrose, and multi-vitamins to 1.25 Liters a day, they had to rush me had been rushed lights and sirens to Trauma Room One of Berkshire Medical Center. It took them a while too stabilize me in the ER, but once they did they brough me to my room in the ICU.

The first … Find Out What Happens Next

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