For the next 4 days I peacefully slept it off and was inaccessible and hallucinating. Poor Geoff was there every day from 8am until 7pm advocating for me. Luckily Jason was never done at school or sports practice until 7 anyway and Aimee had lots of people who wanted to take her home from school until Geoff got home. It was hell though. It wasn’t until Friday that I could even talk or think straight. I didn’t talk to or see my kids for 5 days.
Once I got on the right pain relief, I was transferred to a new room, so of course I looked at the room number for answers. This time I was in room #9. That worried me. It’s my Lifetime number and I was concerned about my Lifetime number being one of the most common years that people die in. In my stupor, I didn’t remember that I wasn’t looking at my Growth Cycle, I was looking at my room number!
9 is the Hermit. The Hermit is about taking time by yourself to become more introspective so you can reflect on what you still need to complete before you can achieve success. So now my task was to understand what I needed to complete to get out of this hospital! Once I realized I wasn’t going to die, I kept wondering what the completion was going to be.
On Friday when I could finally communicate and think clearly, I asked Geoff, “Wasn’t Bailly here that first day before I got on the right medication?” I remembered her there while I was writhing in pain and her telling me she was going to pray for me. So I thought about her all Shabbos until I could call her. How did she know I was at the hospital? No one knew that soon.
After Shabbos I found out that the day I went into the hospital, Bailly was supposed to meet with Andrea. Geoff had called Andrea to pick up Aimee from school so when Andrea had to cancel her meeting with Bailly, she found out I was in the hospital. When she got there, she relieved Lee and Geoff to get something to eat while she sat and prayed for an hour and a half. After she was done, my doctor came and gave me the right pain medicine! (That's why I say she saved my life. People have died from their colon bursting. It's rare but can happen.)
It wasn’t until Friday that I fully understood what my diagnosis was. They gave me a CT scan and diagnosed neutrapenia induced colitis. They were telling me that now my white counts were back up but I needed a blood transfusion for my red counts. So on Friday night I got the transfusion and was so much better on Saturday.
Over the weekend one of docs told me I was ready to leave on Monday and all he needed to see was that I could eat. I hadn’t eaten anything but my IV fluids for 4 days. But once I started eating even broth, my colon would act up. So that was worrisome. I knew I’d eat better at home but how could I convince them to release me?
I did have a “hospitalist” overlooking my case. She was such a blessing. She was a family practice doctor who’d come in and actually sit down with me. Listen to me. Take her time to answer all questions for as long as I needed. If you ever land in the hospital, get your family practice doctor to send one of these. She got permission for me to bring food from home, along with making sure many other things got done that the hospital was falling through on. Too bad she wasn't sent until Friday.
So on Monday, I just wanted to go home but when my oncologist came in she told me it was her opinion I needed to stay one more night because she hadn’t seen me all weekend. I told her I disagreed with her that I would do better at home. She told me to let her be my doctor and her instincts are usually right. I told her I shouldn’t have to pay for her not seeing me over the weekend and asked her by the way, what happened when I first got here and had no pain management for 12 hours? She said she wanted to move slowly and not go to the heavier drugs due to them causing constipation. So I told her that her instincts were wrong in the beginning and they are wrong now and it would be more healing for me to leave today. She finally agreed to discuss it with the other doctors on my case and if they agreed, she’d release me. I had to wait 6 hours for her release.
I have never before in my life spoken to an authority figure with such personal power. I felt like a different person because it was totally out of my normal character. So maybe that was the higher purpose of my going to the hospital: to take more control of my healing journey and stand up to my doctors when I know I need something and they aren’t responding. I don’t really ever know G-d’s purpose but just having the perspective of G-d controlling even the bad things in my life for a higher purpose does help me to get through them.
I'm going to see that doctor again this morning for the first time since the hospital. She will give her opinion on what I should do next with my next treatment. Wish me luck that I can still be as self-advocating as I learned to be that day I was released from the hospital!
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