Rat Maze Virtues

Rat Maze Redux

Pam evidently decided she missed the ol' Rat Maze.  After spending most of the night in the ER on Thursday night and Friday morning, she is back in the hospital.

Earlier in the day on Thursday, she had an uneventful follow up appointment with Dr. Holtan.  Overall, Dr. Holtan couldn't have been more pleased with Pam's progress, but she was still concerned about Pam's inability to shake her chest congestion and she STILL tests positive for Influenza A. 

To explain, a person with a fully functioning, mature immune system would never test positive for the virus this long. It has been about 75 days since she first tested positive.  Dr. Holtan was joking about seeing if she qualified for the "Consecutive Days Testing Positive for Influenza A" in the Guiness Book of World Records. She suspects that the virus isn't really still live, but the test is positive because there are still remnants of the the dead virus in her system. 

More troubling has been the bronchitis and shortness of breath. The degree of shortness of breath she is experiencing is only partially explained by anemia, which leads us to how we ended up spending some more "quality time" at the RM.

ER Adventure

Thursday evening around 9:30, Pam's shortness of breath was getting critical. She couldn't even walk from the kitchen to living room in our spacious 800 sq foot condo without resting. It was getting obvious, even to me, that she needed to go to the hospital.  As part of this whole transplant program, you are instructed in situations like this to call the hospital and have the person that is on call with the Bone Marrow Transplant Team paged. Just to make sure that you have the numbers handy, they give you a list of contact numbers, a 3 ring binder full of instructions which also includes all of the phone numbers you may need, and, of all things, a refrigerator magnet with the phone number and the instructions for contacting the BMT team. It seemed like total overkill to me at the time.  So, as Pam was gasping for breath, cool headed customer that I am, I forgot about all of the above, and had to ask her where I could find that info.  She gasped "refrigerator".  I said, "oh, yea... I knew that", called the BMT people, they called the ER to let them know we were coming, and we were off.


I think we have been to ERs four times now since this adventure started, I have actually lost count. This ER visit was, by far, the worst. The nurse was quite nice, but the attending ER resident was without a clue, and I had to remind 5 out of the 6 people traipsing into the room, including the clueless ER resident, the x ray technician, the registration guy, and one of the nurses that they were supposed to wear a mask and gloves.  I am not even sure they all cleaned their hands.  In between "traipses", we sat in the little room for interminable periods of time. Pam couldn't get comfortable on the gurney. She was miserable.

There was a poor mentally disturbed patient in the room next door, and someone who was in handcuffs and escorted by a Portland Police Officer screaming about his injury across the hall, but that was really the only distraction during our stay.

Patience is a Virtue

I have been working on all of the virtues, like Honesty, Humility, Tolerance, Avoiding Bad Music (like Jazz that doesn't have a melody or any Rap) and some other ones that I
forget. During most of the ER visit, I was playing hearts on my cell phone and working on developing my Patience Virtue.  But I lost patience with the Patience Virtue, and gave up on it and focused instead on avoiding Rap, which was really easy and made me feel like I was accomplishing something.

In the end, we arrived at the ER at 10 PM and Pam didn't get into her new hospital room until after 3 in the morning. I didn't get back to our condo until about 3:45 AM, got to bed about 4, and was at the office by 8 because I had to make final preparations for a webinar my colleague Keddrick and I were presenting for Clinicient at noon.

View of the Willamette
Looking East from Pam's New Room
Kohler Wing (Old Room) on the Left

So, naturally, I was pretty bushed after the webinar.  I don't know if I even made any sense jabbering away fueled only by caffeine and adrenaline. I know that I was talking way too fast, but got through it OK. I will listen to the recording when I think I can handle it.

Today, Pam is obviously much better. She is on oxygen, but she is very relieved not to feel short of


View from Pam's New Room
Pedestrian Bridge
Between OHSU and the VA

breath all of the time.  She still has a rapid heart rate and her oxygen saturation is around 90%.  She needs to be at at least 92% oxygen saturation on room air. Her chest x rays are looking better, and she is being switched to oral anti-biotics.  If her lungs continue to clear up, she may get out of here as early as tomorrow.  Her nurse is bristling at the thought of her getting out that soon, she is going to make it clear to the team that she is better, but not that much better, so we shall see...

Knocking on wood didn't work.  I'm going to start knocking on formica or something.