The anxiety I felt during my last two days in the hospital was probably the worst I’ve experienced. Every few hours it seemed that some nurse or specialist was coming in and telling me about a new test that Dr. Abbineni had ordered before she’d fully sign off on releasing me come Monday. When you’re a planner, someone who prepares for absolutely everything, to have tests done you have zero way to “study” for is a whole new nightmare.
The worst of these tests was an overnight pulse ox monitor, to be done without the CPAP, only on oxygen. See, when I was awake, I knew how to control my breathing to get my oxygen saturation to be well within what they considered “normal”. When you are asleep, you have no control over it, and even sleeping in an elevated state with a nasal cannula, I was terrified it would drop to a point that then they’d make me stay longer.
And in hindsight – it probably wouldn’t have been the worst thing for me to stay a little longer – but they didn’t fully appreciate that I absolutely had to get home Monday, or at least be somewhere with better wifi.
Here is where I sidebar, and I tell you the long-winded rant about my career. If you don’t care to read this debacle – just know it all worked out in the end HAHAHA.
I fell into the IT field by accident, over 15 years ago. All because of a typing test and an analytical personality assessment done by a temp agency in order to place me in a clerical pool for a major company. I could type over 100 wpm, and I tested so high on the analytics part that they made me retake it because they thought the test malfunctioned. While I thought I was being sent to this company to be a run-of-the-mill billing clerk, their IT Director got a hold of my test results and snatched me up. This started my career.
However, I’m generally pretty blunt, and I don’t always work well on a team. Not to mention, all the previous self-worth stuff left a huge chip on my shoulder, and I’ve not always been the easiest employee to deal with. I spent 8 years with that company, doing a ton of work and making a name for myself because I was great at my job, I was just a total pain in the ass to deal with if things didn’t go the way I thought they should. I was so good at the job I did, but was so bad at the interpersonal stuff, that it left me passed over for promotions and things I should have been handed, which added to my growing pain in the ass behavior.
From there, I’d spent the next 4 years jumping around as a contractor from company to company never being more than a seat filler for a contract. Gone was the security of an internal position, at any time the companies I was placed with could choose to go with a different vendor or do away with my position and I’d just be out of a job.
In 2018, I was approached by a vendor who said they weren’t staff augmentation, they were consulting – it was supposed to be completely different. If the client I’d be placed with didn’t have work for me, I was still employed and drawing a salary, they would just have me be in the consulting office either doing trainings or shadowing leadership etc. – the job seemed like my entire career goal on a platter. The only downfall, the client who they wanted me to be at was over an hour drive away. When I told them I wouldn’t be interested – they pushed harder. I was told that if I came in and did a good job, in 6 months they could move me to office space closer to home that this client had, and even if not – in those 6 months they would work on getting me several certifications that they’d then be able to just move me to a client that was closer. They sweetened the deal with added paid time off over the holidays, bonuses, etc. – so I’d agreed.
Long story short – that had all been a lie.
Most of the “benefits” and added time off went away within the first 6 months, and they regularly lied about the client’s feedback on performance reviews.
Thank God this client was unlike any other company I’d worked for though, and the team I’d been placed in had several genuinely great people or I would likely still be bouncing from vendor to vendor. Their people took an interest in helping me excel, and lived by their belief that we all win together so if they help me succeed, it helps the company succeed.
However, much like most of corporate America, the team on the ground doing the work isn’t always the one making the decisions that affect them the most – and higher ups decided that they were changing the organization of our division – which would put me out of a job because they were not going to continue utilizing my vendor.
I brought this up in a previous part of these posts, that they were trying to get a position posted for an internal spot for me to apply to – as luck would have it – that position posted the morning after I went into my coma. Now a lot of times, due to the amount of lawsuits it can open a company up to, you can only keep a post open for so long, especially if you get any applicants for it – otherwise it can be seen as impropriety. The position was supposed to only be open for two weeks, and they’d had no interest in it at that time, so thankfully, they were able to extend the listing – but due to the company’s policy they could only do an extension once, and only for a week.
In order to even be considered for the role, I had to go through the application process first, and the wifi at the hospital wasn’t fast enough for me to even load the sign on page to do so. The listing was due to close at 11:59pm that Monday. So in my mind – I absolutely HAD to be released – even if for a few hours to go home and use my high-speed internet to apply.
Yes, I wanted to be home to sleep in my own home, to be in my own space and to see my damned dog I was missing dearly, and above all else – to FINALLY be able to take a shower… but I absolutely had to apply for this position, otherwise, the future of my career was going to be the same roller coaster that was running me into the ground.
Friday night – the same day that Dr. Abbineni had said I would probably be going home on Monday – the manager for my vendor started drunk texting me. I say drunk texting me because of the amount of typos in his messages, and also because anyone who knows this guy knows that he has the highest expense account at this vendor because he lives for happy hours. He’s been reprimanded for drunk texting employees before, but is still employed as a senior manager.
He starts telling me that unless I come up with close to a thousand dollars within a week – a check payable to my vendor – that they’re going to have to let my insurance lapse, even though the way our salary is done it shouldn’t lapse unless I’m out of work longer than 3 months. Of course when I question why this is – the truth of it comes out in his drunken stupor. They don’t really do insurance the way that they’re supposed to, so larger payment we make during enrollment month every year doesn’t really buffer shit – and because I don’t have billable hours to the client, the client won’t be paying them for me, so they do not have a safety net in place to cover my insurance costs – but that even if they did they wouldn’t because if they made that exception for me, they’d have to make it for everyone.
I was only 5 days post 24/7 fentanyl drip at this point – to say my brain was still fuzzy would be an understatement. I didn’t have the mental capacity to look at the situation logically at 9pm on a Friday night when I’m still hooked up to 3 monitors and two IV lines in a critical care wing of the local hospital. So I ignored the texts – no sense in arguing with a drunk moron – I would deal with it when I was home.
But all I thought about from then on was I had to get home – because if I didn’t get home and get back to work, there wasn’t going to be any way to cover the medical bills for all the aftercare and follow up that was going to have to happen.
Saturday night – they did the overnight pulse ox, a loud, obnoxious gray box that they glue a monitor to your finger, but the connection of it sucks, so it goes off if you move too much, or bend your finger the wrong way. It also has a VERY loud beep every 20 seconds to let you know that it’s actually working – how in the world they ever expected me to sleep with this thing on was beyond me. Not only because you have to lay almost perfectly still, and you get just about asleep and it’ll start siren beeping that it’s lost connection – but it also didn’t read accurately. The regular pulse ox that I had on that was connected to the heart monitors, showed my pulse ox stayed right around 96 most of the time. Under 94 it would start beeping. But this device for overnight monitoring that the pulmonology team brought it, never did register that I had a pulse ox higher than 92 at any given time.
Needless to say, aside from a few 20 minute power naps throughout the night, I didn’t sleep.
Sundays are a ghost town at the hospital. The normal rounds aren’t done, and the access to support services is apparently only a Monday through Friday thing. It gave me time to catch up on sleep through the day Sunday, but I was completely wound up about going home. I’m sure I made the nurses’ lives a living hell by bugging them with questions from the pulse ox test, to what time did they think I’d get discharged, etc. – oh well. I was ready to go!
Sunday night was more of the same – I tried to sleep – didn’t do much more than doze for 20 minutes here or there, and by this point I was in so much physical discomfort and pain it wasn’t funny. Everything hurt, my skin hurt, it hurt to sit, it hurt to lay down. Just the feeling of laying perfectly still on their harsh, bleached bed sheets, was enough to make me almost cry.
The upside to the weekend was seeing a lot of the nursing staff that had been on during my coma, and hearing stories about Trysha and the things that had happened while I’d been out. Particularly, one male nurse that sang while he was in the room – I remembered him because of the singing! – and another who I’d been especially combative with and had even flipped off while in a coma. It was giving hugs to the ones that were our favorites, crying with them when they’d get emotional talking about being on my case since the beginning – let me tell you – the gravity of how severe it was is not lost on me, and the way the nursing staff who dealt with the worst through pandemic, to get to see the joy on their faces that they knew I was going to get out and had made a near miracle recovery is something I will never forget.
MONDAY MORNING!!!!!!!!
I believe I woke up Trysha before the cafeteria was even open. I wanted to start planning to leave, I wanted to put together a game plan and we were going to follow that game plan because I was about to be back in charge.
She’d already gotten me going home clothes, some stuff from home, and we’d already kind of packed up most of everything in the room. But by 7am, I was ready to go!
Rounds happened, the doctors came in, and Dr. Abbineni gave me the magical words – Oxygen had been ordered – I was going home. She urged me to continue with the progress I’d made, and warned me that I wasn’t 100% yet, and to try to remember that.
Now with all the discharge stuff – had to wait for nursing to come in and unhook me, had to do one last pulse ox test while walking to confirm I would only need oxygen while sleeping – I passed obviously – and then I was told I could get out of the hospital garb and get dressed in normal clothes!
So here is where I tell you – I wasn’t about to admit weakness now – but the lack of sleep over the weekend, that had followed 3 weeks of literal physical hell on my body – I should have let them help me. The amount of energy it took to even maneuver getting dressed on my own made me cry in the bathroom. To go from being the person who was used to doing everything on her own to being someone who could barely get dressed on her own and realizing that I was going to have to completely depend on people for a while was humbling.
But I powered through – even managed to put contacts in for the first time in 3 weeks!
Signed the final papers and I let them wheel me out of the critical care unit to the car and Trysha waiting to take me home.
Sigh of relief once I was inside the car and on the way home, but it’s almost like this weird feeling because everything is the same – the city we were in, the road we took home, etc – but everything had changed too – the summer heat was gone, the Fall chill was in the air, fields that had still been up and only just turning, all harvested, the trees had already done their bright color change and were now growing bare as the majority of the leaves had fallen.
I tried not to be too upset that I’d missed my favorite parts of my favorite season – and I tried to focus on the fact that I was finally going home.
Mustard Seed Mama 