Unofficial Discharge Day
It’s a good day. I woke up with my nurse by my bedside and she told me some great news. I was finally going to be discharged, Unofically discharged. This meant that I would be able to sleep at home but I would have to come back to the hospital everyday until the 23rd of December for my medications. The positive to this would be that I could now sleep in my own bed and have the comfort of being at home. I’ve spent the last 3 months in Hospital and it hasn’t been great. Lets just say, Netflix made my stay in the hospital a lot better. Hospital environment as we all know isn’t the best, you have no privacy and it isn’t the most hygienic place. When my friends and family couldn’t spend time with me, I would either be working on this blog or watching movies on my iPad. The worst part about it is that from November 3rd onwards I didn’t have wifi… When I was in D4 I had wifi. After the LVAD operation, I was transferred to the 5th floor and there is no wifi up here.
Back to topic, I could finally be at home. I will have to come back twice a day for 2 hours each. Once in the morning and once at night. This still means that during the day, I now have the freedom to go out, see people and try and settle back to a normal lifestyle. Another reason why I won’t be fully discharged yet is because the doctors want to see how I settle in at home, they want to see if I can handle being at home eg; continue taking my meds and see if there wouldn’t be any relapses of passing out and so on.
I forgot to mention, earlier on in my posts that one of the weekends I had come home for a couple of hours and things didn’t go my way. I had been so excited to be at home that I forgot to drink water and eat food. My pump is actually dependent on the liquids in my body as it helps everything flow around more smoothly, if I don’t drink water, there is a higher chance that I will have another LOC (Loss of Consciousness). I sat on my couch for a couple of hours playing Xbox and watching TV that I completely forgot to drink water. I stood up and somehow felt a cramp in my chest and my vision was blurry. I walked back to my couch because I felt really weird and after a couple of seconds I had an LOC. My dad called my ICU nurses straight after I gained my consciousness and they told me to go to bed. The one mistake we made after this was that I didn’t drink enough water or eat any food. After sleeping I woke up and I couldn’t move my body… I felt paralysed. My dad started to panic and I started to freak out. I couldn’t move my arms or my legs but I was able to speak. Soon after, the ambulance and a medical team arrived at home. My blood pressure was extremely low and I didn’t know what was going on, I was half passed out. I panicked because I thought I had a stroke. I reached the hospital and was rushed back to my ward. They took me straight down for a CT scan and the results come out, nothing was wrong. My doctors sat down with my parents and explained to them the importance of staying hydrated. My life is dependent on the machine and the machine is dependent on liquids, if I don’t follow these simple rules I will end up in a bad situation.
Lets hope that nothing like that ever happens again and from the minute I get home everything goes smoothly.
To read the next part of my story, click the link below -
