Everything went well when I was discharged. At least, things went well at first. I slept in my own bed, got my medication sorted, and enjoyed some real food (because there is no way that hospital food is real). On Tuesday 2nd I took several things to help get things moving along. At this point I was starting to get a bit uncomfortable, which, given not have a bowel movement in over a week, is kind of expected. I took a stool softener, lactulose (twice, and I hate that stuff so I was getting pretty desperate if I was willing to take it twice in one day), and bisacodyl. Still nothing. And then evening rolls around, sitting at the kitchen table having dinner with my family and I did not feel okay anymore. It wasn't so much pain in my gut than incredible discomfort. I hoped it would pass and decided to lay down on my bed for a bit. It soon became evident that things were not going to feel better.
Around 8pm mum and I decided to go the the ER, knowing full well that I had a post op appointment In Hamilton the next morning at 9:30. Good bye sleep! At the triage office they took my vitals. The nurse was pretty concerned with my heart rate, a lovely 140 beats a minute while sitting down! Remember I had been having problems over the course of the previous week and that pompous internal medicine resident said not to worry about it? Well, the triage nurse was worried about it and said he would see if we could be seen pretty quickly. Unfortunately for us, this didn't happen and we still sat in the waiting area for several hours before being called back.
Once we were called to be seen by a doctors or experience was great. The doctor I had was fantastic. He was actually quite concerned about the high heart rate and didn't understand why the hospital discharged me without trying to find the route cause. His main concern was that I could have a blood clot in one of my lungs because I had major surgery and was immobile a good 95% of the time. Plus the fixator. All those factors put people at a greater risk for blood clots. He was surprised that no one from the thrombosis team came to see me while in the hospital. Fast forward several hours later and I was getting a CT scan of my chest and an x ray of my abdomen. Thank fully there was no blood clot! Hurrah!
At some point, the other issues worked itself out. Be it due to all the stuff I had taken earlier in the day, or the sudden burst of physical activity it took to get around the hospital (movement is known to help with this sort of thing, and I had been laying in a bed most of the previous eight days), we will never know. But at least things got moving.
The ER doctor was happy that there was no blood clot but concerned that something else could be causing the high heart rate. He agreed that it could just be a combination of the major surgery and trauma caused by the external fixator or one of my medications, but said it was still important to get it checked out and to try to find the route cause. He said he just was not comfortable with a patient who had a resting heart rate of 140. He prescirbed me a bunch of stuff in case the issue I originally came in for caused more problems and referred me to the rapid assessment clinic to see a cardiologist to make sure everything was a okay with my ticker.
So with a prescription for some lovely things like citro-mag and the promise that the rapid assessment clinic would contact me within two days, I was discharged around quarter past seven. Just enough time for us to race home, brush our teeth, comb our hair and don clean clothing so we would look presentable at my post op appointment and scarf down some breakfast. All on zero hours of sleep. But, at least we would actually be able to make it to the appointment!
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