Alithea phoned Mom and Dad to let them know I was en-route to Miami Valley. My family arrived at the hospital before I did. One of the first things I remember after going through the door of the hospital is being wheeled down the hall on the gurney and Mom and Dad standing outside my assigned ER treatment room.
Let me assess who was at the hospital. My parents, several of my brothers, sisters and their spouses, and I think all of the church family that was meeting at their house. This was a very large group of people. I am so blest!
Lying in the ER I drifted in and out of consciousness. Two of the church elders came in when permitted and anointed my head with oil and prayed for me. Most of the group came in two at a time but sometimes I was unconscious and unaware of their presence. One thing I do remember. A doctor was working on me and asking me questions. My sister Amy and daughter Alithea was standing at the foot of the bed. I told the doctor I wanted to go home. I don’t have insurance and can’t pay for this. He asks flat out. “Do you want to live?” Then waited until I answered. It seemed like hours but I know it wasn’t. Then I answered “yes”. He said bluntly “You have several internal organs that have shut down. If you go home, you will die. If you stay, we are going to do our best to try and save your life.” End of argument.
By this time it was somewhere around 11:00 PM and they were finding me a room. I got a suite all to myself, in the Coronary Care Unit, CCU. First time in my life I had a luxury suite in a High Class Establishment! It looks like my erratic heart beat paid off. Smile, just kidding. But I did have to wear a heart monitor for 3 or 4 days.
I had been there only a few minutes when a couple of nurses came in to install another IV. Seemed to me I already had two or three but apparently one had come out. These CCU nurses tried for quite a while but failed. Finally one said. “The Care Flight girls will be here in a few minutes. They deal with this all the time. Let’s get them to do it.” The issue here, now my circulatory system was collapsing.
A little while later I woke up and 3 Care Flight nurses was working on me. I had one on my left arm and two on the right. I had been sweating profusely. The lady to my left exited the room for additional supplies and the other two continued on my right arm.
Apparently one of them was new to Care Flight emergency responders and the lead nurse was instructing her. I heard the lead ask. “Do you smell that sweet odor on him?” Then came the answer “Yes”. “Anytime your out on site and smell that on a patient you know they’re a diabetic and they are DKA”, Diabetic ketoacidosis. In layman’s terms their A1C blood glucose level is outrageous. Being the professionals they were I got my IV and they went on about other duties. And my A1C level, a hefty 12.5. Yip, I may have been a smelly old guy but I was pretty sweet!
After a long day it was time to get some rest. Can anyone sleep in the hospital? When you have heart trouble they watch you close. The diabetes required finger pricks for glucose monitoring every 2 hours and withdrawal of blood vials for lab work at 4-6 hour intervals. And of course changing to new IV’s or adding to the IV medications. All sorts of test had to be performed repeatedly to make sure where I was in the recovery process. That is if I recovered. Although I must say sleep or just plain unconsciousness returned quickly after every awakening. Tomorrow came. Hooray! I made it through the night.
Alithea went above and beyond everything I had ever dreamed of in a daughter. During my hospital stay she drove from the Greater Middletown area to the hospital every day without fail. Many days she was there twice, morning and evening. She even went to Grand Mothers 3 times and picked up Heather and brought her to see Daddy. And one of those trips not only brought Heather but Grand Mother too! I still can’t figure out how she worked her day job, went to night school and did all the other things necessary for life on top of the commutes to Dayton to visit me. I spent 3 nights in CCU, 1 night on a Heart floor and 3 more nights on a Renal-Diabetes floor before dismissal.
Night 2 came and passed with the usual hospital agenda. Once more morning had come and again I was glad to still have the breath of life in me. Let me take a step back and make a correction here. The night was hospital business as usual with the exception a vision had started at some point through the