a week of travail (2)

Tuesday-Thursday, April 9-11, 2024

Monday night saw me moved from the emergency room to a berth on the 16th floor, in the cardiac ward. A lot about this felt familiar, and over the next few days, I ended up going through many of the same routines I had gone through when I'd had my stroke: for example, frequent checks of my blood pressure and blood-sugar levels all through the night. I had one CT scan on Tuesday (a computer voice commanded me to take breaths and hold them, then release) and several x-rays, plus a couple more thoracic ultrasounds. There was no MRI, perhaps because I'd said that lying flat on my back was causing me breathing problems, and an MRI would involve lying flat and still for thirty minutes—something I wasn't able to do. Or, for all I know, there was no MRI because one wasn't needed. I was only rarely subjected to cognitive tests like "What's your name?" and "What's your date of birth?" Mostly, whenever the nurses came by to do procedures, they would simply scan my wristband, which had my info and a bar code on it. Before I moved to the cardiac ward, I was given a set of hospital clothes to change into—the You Are Officially Sick and Belong to Us moment. I had no idea, at the time, how long I'd be remaining at the hospital. I assumed the staff's goal was to stabilize my heart and lungs, then educate me on what I'd be doing once I was out of the hospital.

I was also back on hospital meals, but I was given no choice as to whether I'd be eating from a Korean or a Western menu: the staff simply put me on the Western food, a fact that I took passively, not bothering to request a change to a Korean diet. I recalled that, three years earlier, the Korean menu billed as "for diabetics" included a lot of rice, a carby and seeming unwise choice for someone coming in with high blood sugar. The Western menu turned out to be just as nonsensical: for my first breakfast Tuesday morning, I got a weird combination of leafy-green salad and cereal. It was hard for me to work up an appetite; everything made me feel vaguely nauseous—not because the food was bad, but simply because. The only things I really enjoyed from the breakfast tray were (1) the coffee, which came with Equal sugarless sweetener; (2) a tiny carton of milk; (3) a tiny cup—barely a swallow—of orange juice; and (4) some slices of pre-peeled orange, all ready to be gulped down. There were hard-boiled eggs as well, and I had one but couldn't eat the other. I might have eaten some of the cereal (unsweetened cornflakes); I don't recall finishing it. Along with that first breakfast came a sheet with a list of lunch items; from then on, I could check which food items I'd like. Presumably, everything on the list had been pre-approved, including the carby dinner rolls. Over the next few days, my meals went that way: I'd get my meal plus a check-off list for the following meal. This got me into a prisoner's mentality: after a rough start with no appetite, I started looking forward to mealtimes as the highlight of my otherwise dreary days. 

My boss, being my bohoja/guardian again, visited me periodically. He dutifully went to my apartment to pick up items I'd need to survive the heat and discomfort of hospital existence: my stupid-looking, thick-framed glasses (so I wouldn't have to constantly put on and take off my contacts); my mini electric fan so I wouldn't be sweating up a storm; my cell-phone charger. He even brought me an extra pair of socks; Koreans have a thing about holey socks, but I didn't put those new socks on until my final day.

I was moved, late Tuesday if I remember correctly, to another berth because my boss couldn't be with me 24 hours a day. This was a special berth that was staffed with more people who could watch over me in place of the bohoja. Otherwise, the routine tests continued, including a new one to me: a weigh-in. I'd started off at 118 kg, still 10 kg below my worst-ever weight, and by the time I left the hospital, I was down to 113 kg.

Another thing they had me do was log my urination history. They forced me to piss more frequently by pumping me full of diuretics (chemicals that help expel urine from the body); I got to a point where I was pissing an average of 500 cc every 45 minutes, and on Tuesday, I astounded myself by excreting over two liters of urine. How the hell had I contained that much? I joked to my boss that, one day, they'd cut open my cadaver, look at my internal organs, and marvel at the sheer size of my bladder.

I think I had three roommates in all. One was an old man who couldn't sleep while my fan was on, so I had little choice but to shut the fan off and suffer through the night, sweating. He later apologized for having been difficult, but I waved his apology off while secretly cursing him. The nurses gave me a "cold pillow" during that night to alleviate my suffering; I guessed that they kept the ward's temperature at around 26 or 27ºC, which is great for women, who generally like a warmer office environment, but hell on us guys. My preferred office temp is around 22 or 23 degrees. When the old man left Wednesday afternoon, he was replaced by a very quiet man who was in for cardiac surgery. I never found out what kind, but I've heard that stent installation is a fairly simple procedure; he seemed to be in and out of surgery fairly quickly. His wife proved more talkative than he was; he struck me as even more introverted than I am while the Missus proved a lot more talkative. I didn't get a good look at him until my final day, which is when I realized he was fairly young-looking. The old man and the introvert were my two final roommates; I can't remember who my first roommate was.

Wednesday was a parliamentary election day in South Korea, and my boss and his family had things to do that day, so I had no visitors. On Thursday, my Korean coworker took the bohoja pass from my boss and visited me. I had also heard from the doctors and nurses around me that I was supposed to meet a team at around 1:30 p.m. to get educated about what to do post-discharge. But at around 1 p.m., my blood pressure dropped precipitously; I was woozy and ready to faint, but I fought my way to the bathroom, had another piss, logged the volume of urine (around 400-500 cc), told the nurses how I was feeling, and got treated. By the time my BP had stabilized, there was no way I could make the Thursday-afternoon meeting, so it was rescheduled for the next day. I could've sworn they'd said it'd be in the late afternoon, at around 3:30 p.m., but I guess I misunderstood. (The meeting also turned out to be with a single doctor, not with a team. I really have to improve my Korean.) Anyway, the BP thing was scary; I've never fainted before, and that's only the second time in my life that I've come close to doing so. I did somehow retain enough consciousness to snap a pic of the BP monitor showing a reading of 66/46—the lowest blood pressure I've had in my life, especially after years of being around 180/95 (which is also scary when you think about it).

To occupy myself, and since I couldn't rely on the hospital's WiFi to watch YouTube on my phone, I spent my time reading Lee Child's Persuader, a Jack Reacher adventure novel that will be the template for Season 3. Persuader ended up being the best of the Reacher novels I've read thus far, so I'm hoping Season 3 of the Amazon show does it justice.

Thursday ended like the other days—with more testing and BP/sugar checks, more weighings, and the occasional question about whether I was sneaking any snacks: the staff had gotten my BP down and stabilized (I was a classic 120/80 at one point), but despite their best efforts, my blood-sugar numbers were still very high, so they were left to wonder why the number was so stubborn. I don't blame anyone but myself for that although I still marvel that there are people who doubtless have worse numbers yet somehow avoid being in the hospital.

I'd also heard that Friday would be my last day in the hospital, but I wondered what time of day I'd actually be leaving if I had that afternoon meeting to look forward to.

Stay tuned for the conclusion.

the lowest BP I ever did see

My Korean coworker dropped in late Thursday afternoon.