Much to my surprise, I got a call
Thursday morning saying that they DID have a room for me and could do a direct
admission! Even the nurse was shocked, as it has been almost impossible for
them to direct admit anyone recently. I was SO relieved not to have to spend
hours waiting in the ER, and I fully attribute this blatant miracle to the
power of Purim! Even better, they didn’t call me to come in until about 4pm, so
I got to enjoy a full Purim seuda without interruption. Celebrating Purim
before going inpatient definitely helped put me in a better frame of mind. I
also realized that getting mishloach manot immediately before being
hospitalized was absolutely perfect. Instead of going shopping for hospital snacks,
I just waited at home and the snacks came to me! Winning!
We did a CT scan, and fortunately I DON’T
have a pulmonary embolism. Unfortunately, I once again managed to develop
pneumonia while on IV antibiotics, because I am super talented. This time I
decided to take it to the next level and get pneumonia in BOTH lungs, because I’m
an overachiever. If you’re gonna do something, may as well do it right!
There’s no way to tell whether the
pneumonia is due to infection or due to aspirating reflux in my sleep, so we’re
tackling both at the same time. On Monday I’m hopefully having my G-tube
changed to a G/J-tube, which is less likely to cause reflux overnight. In terms
of infection, the original plan was to continue IV antibiotics, as well as a whole
lot of nebulizers and chest PT, and see if I had any improvement by Monday. If
I didn’t improve, the plan was to start treatment for the NTM (non-tuberculosis
mycobacterium) that’s been showing up in my sputum in recent months. The
problem is that requires 3-6 months on multiple antibiotics, one of which is IV
Tobramycin, the antibiotic that gave me tinnitus and can cause hearing loss. I REALLY
wasn’t thrilled about having to choose whether I wanted to breathe or whether I
wanted to hear. HOWEVER, on Sunday they got some new test results back, and
discovered that my pseudomonas infection is now resistant to 2 of the 3 antibiotics
I’ve been taking. Surprise! They also found one more antibiotic that it should
be susceptible to, so the new plan is to try that for a week and see if I feel
any better. I’m all for anything that pushes off going back on Tobramycin!
It was a pretty rough weekend.
Between coughing, fevers, being poked and prodded at all hours, and just
generally feeling gross and uncomfortable, sleep hasn’t been happening on any
sort of regular basis. Additionally, I have been coughing up A LOT of mucus.
Getting it out is definitely a good thing, but it isn’t coming out easily, and
the whole process has been exhausting. My throat is ragged from all the
coughing, and I’m having trouble sleeping because I keep waking up choking on
mucus. I’m not exactly living my best life right now, but hopefully the new
antibiotic will help and things will pick up soon.
I’ve also been doing vlogs of my
hospital adventures if anyone is interested in a slightly different version of
these health updates. If you subscribe to my YouTube channel and click the
notification bell, you’ll get alerts when a new post goes up. Let me know what
you think!
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