Hi GF, yes I suppose you could say I am the same Orik that is registered on D.V, D.A.T.W, M.M.B and here at Discover Seattle, I just am not the same man or poster that I used to be, some things have changed with in me and in my life, one of them being I am no longer on the forums morning noon and night.
GF As for my health It is not the best but not the worst. I am anemic and on a twice daily iron supplements. My Billy Rubin is good, my clotting seems to be fine, My strength and energy are up and down. I still can not walk very far and I need a significant amount of time to recover My breath & energy levels. I have to work at conditioning.
I try to improve them but it is not going well and worse since some bastard stole my Bariatric Rollator it is designed for morbidly obese persons and with out it I can not walk to far. My lung health from smoking for so many years is horrible, I quit smoking but the damage to the lungs is irreversible. I use my Ventolin and Atrovent daily which helps and I no longer need the BiPap & oxygen but I still have to use the BiPap when overly exerted along with the C.P.A.P at night.
I ride my bike as often as I can & I do much better at that, again this depends on my days, I mostly take it one day at a time. Some days really are much better than others, I am happy to be alive and at home. The hospital could not really do much except provide some medications for pain relief so I at least was not in pain, medications that kept me from being nauseous & sick
Then there was the Potassium supplement taken 3 to 6 times a day, Special K which is a drug given to me a few times that allows for a persons blood to clot better & that stuff tastes foul even worse than the potassium tablets. They also had me hooked up to IV's saline for fluids & antibiotics I forget what some of the other ones were. On a few occasions there was some blood byproducts IV's of plasma et cetera.
They even provided bland nutritious food so I at ate if you can call hospital food, food, sometimes I wondered... even though on my bad days I vomited it all back up. The best was my brother sneaking me in a pizza and my friend ray sneaking me in a Sub.. God bless them for the real food.
Mostly what I do remember was blood tests 3 or more times a day, some of the reasons for the multiple blood tests I underwent everyday was to monitor my potassium levels. the bloods clotting factor, my billy rubin & iron levels.
One of the things I hated about being in hospital was on my really bad days I was nearly incoherent and I needed assistance, Just to get to the bathroom or to take a shower =( there is no worse feeling than the shame I felt when I had all my pride stripped away and was urinating in a bottle or worse having some one wash you. No it was Not much fun at all, and then they do the other battery of tests which were more painful and less pleasant than the blood tests.
Most of my time in hospital I spent sleeping, in thoughtful meditation or prayer as some may call it and vast amounts of time reading, T.V. being to expensive and besides nothing is good on tv anyways. Since I do not own a laptop and the patient lounge is often used as a overflow room there was not much else to do.
The computer lab on Saint Paul's fifth floor does not have enough volunteers to be kept open, so my time there was very limited, I spent some time watching the nurses and stealing away to post when I could on D.S. The Computers have a very restricted usage. So I could not even play any online games, Posting to the forums or even doing my email was tedious and difficult. So I prayed just to heal up to be healthy enough to go home or to die. At that point I did not really care to much which, all I wanted was to get the hell out of the hospital.
GF I Am fairly happy. I still feed the lab every 2 to 3 weeks when running the battery of blood tests, urinalysis is usually once a month keeping an eye on my kidneys for infection the breakdown of the medications I take.. not sure how that one works I thought they would get most of that Info from the blood tests..
As for losing weight =( lets just say that is not going so well. There you go more info about me than you cared to know. lol. Have a good one GF and remember everyday above ground Is a good one.
