Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Home, but undiagnosed.

Last night I was shipped home from UCMC and my little isolation room. Twice in the past nineteen days I made journeys from that small room, once for a CT Scan of my chest (I keep asking how many I've had this year, but no seems to want to tell me) and once for a Echocardiogram that I foretold as a waste of time and energy, but the doctorbs seemed to want to through with anyway. I managed to 'escape' from the hospital without the doctorbs taking a chunk from my lung, inserting a chest tube and generally setting my health on an edge, just for 25% chance of identifying the pneumonia I have (had?) in my lungs. That was their plan, and I'll be damned if I'm SIGNING UP for a chest tube. And it's lovely companion, the Pleurovac A-6000. Having a chest tube inserted in your side is akin to having a vaccuum tube (it's that hard) inserted on one end of your lung, on your side. My scar from the last one is still three inches long, dark purple and nasty looking. It's that kind of fun.
Apparently the shots they started handing me of neupagen did the trick for me. They raised my WBC to levels where I could start fighting off the crappy diseases by myself. Raised them from my entering numbers of 0.2 to yesterday's number of 4.7
4.7 is a normal person's count. Now, I'm nowhere near normal, in any arena of my life, but that neupagen gave me strength to begin to stop coughing all day, stop being tired all day every day and get going with the process of getting better.
Upon seeing my WBCs climb, the doctorbs started to wean me off all the IV antibiotics I was on and start me on oral antibiotics, because, let's remember here, the docs still hadn't figured out what I had. All they saw was improvement in my health and they did not know why so they wished to keep me on all the meds they could so as to release me under my terms. In the previous week, the doctorbs had wished to release me home with an IV, an IV pole, and somehow magically get back and forth from the clinic three times weekly. That was one option, which I turned down. Another of their fine ideas was to send me to a nursing home, which I also turned down. Then I demanded they just figure out what the hell is wrong with me, or at least give me something so that I may fight it off. I kept reitterating that I kicked Cancer's ass, and right now I needed just little help and I would kick this pneumonia's ass too. I fought these docs hard, I gotta tell you.
They never figured out what is wrong with me, other than having the common cold, but at least now, I am home, I can sleep for more that three hours uninterrupted, I can shave this beard off, I can shower!, I can cook and I can begin to get back to where I was before October brought me a cold.
Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody.
I've got lots to be thankful for, and I hope you are all very happy on Turkey day and gorge yourself on love and happiness.


PS: The color of Leukemia Awareness's Ribbon is Orange. There's a week in February dedicated to it, and September is the month. Just FYI...