All the nurses and staff that have been here have been great. Well with the expception of one nurse. Nurse Susie- she became extremely irritable with me the first day he was in ICU because there were SO MANY people that came to visit. She really could not believe so many people were showing up. I tried as much as I could to limit the people but finally I gave up. Eventually, we won her over and she started joking around and loosening up. She even helped me sneak Drew in to see Mike- the age requirement to get into ICU is age 12. The nurse we had last night, Margaret, was really good as well- she was a hoot. We had started talking and I had asked her what exactly it was thats shows someone is having a heart attack- I know it is an enzyme they look at but I wanted to know exactly what about this enzyme shows. She pulled up his lab work and showed us. Its kind of interesting how modern medicine knows all this stuff. She said his troponin levels are what they look at. I asked her what "normal" troponin levels were supposed to be. She said normally, a persons troponin levels should be 0.1 or somewhere around there. The night Mike went in his were at 7.00- so you can see that was a pretty good one! I noticed on the computer where each day they have done blood work this number just increased higher, and higher. Yesterday this troponin level was at 32.00 (YIKES) she said that anytime you have trauma to the heart even though they "fixed" it, the levels continue to increase but will come back down. This morning around 4:30 they came in and drew more blood and todays level was back down to 7. I am no Dr. and I assume they know what they are doing, but this still seems high if that level was the level it was at the time of the attack- but I guess thats why they get paid the big bucks. The Dr. never came back in to see him, he just released us and along with that release came a LONG laundry list of do's and don'ts! Take this, eat this, don't eat that... this is going to be a HUGE adjustment for sure.
Tora had started feeling bad a few days ago but with all that was going on, I just couldn't get her to a Dr. today knowing we might get out I scheduled her an appointment. I rushed home got Mike taken care of and settled in, then rushed back out and got Tora in to see a Dr. herself. The diagnosis... Upper respitory infection and bronchitis. Really??!?? So not only do I have to take care of the big sick- she is sick as well and I am trying to keep them apart so Mike won't get what she has. I think I will rename our house Saint Smith Hospital. Sounds fitting right?
I had to laugh as I was standing at the counter of Walgreens waiting to get all the scripts... I thought good lord I have just bought out Walgreens pharmacy!! I of course had to pick up a prescription of my own!
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