The Long Road Ahead (pt 4)

This is taking longer to tell than I thought. I'm going to try to wrap this up in this part or the next, mainly because everything in the hospital after this point is a blur. The combination of pain medication and other drugs I was on, in addition to how much I was trying to sleep and the onset of cabin fever (I was at 3 weeks and I wanted to go home badly), made my memory very spaced out.

After knocking me out again to lay me flat for an MRI, it turned out I had new compression fractures in my lumber spine and two new fractures in my thoracic spine, just below the two old fractures they had just fixed. I had one lone vertebra that was fine, but it was sandwiched in between the others. The pressure of my weight on the one lone supporting vertebra would mean that it would eventually fracture as well, so they would preemptively go in and do the kyphoplasty on it as well, bringing the total of the procedure to 8, and the grand total to 10 after it was all said and done.

Because each vertebra takes about 45-60 minutes, they told me they would be unable to do them all on the same day, so they would do them back to back (no pun intended). Luckily they said the new fractures were fresher, so they hadn't had the time to compress, which means they weren't as bad.

February 6th: They put me under and completed the first 4 vertebra. When I came to, I had some minor tingling in two fingers and an elevated heart rate, which alarmed the doctors. I was also taking a longer time to recover from the procedure than when they did the first one. It might have been related to the anesthesia but they were unsure, so a CT scan was ordered for the next day and postponed the second kyphoplasty until they could confirm it was safe. Luckily we got some good news. First, everything looked normal (they did an EKG of my heart as well) so they scheduled my second kyphoplasty for the following Monday. Second, my original pulmonary embolism was gone. And finally, my tumors were still responding to the treatment.

February 10th: The last 4 vertebra were worked on. This is where things get a bit complicated. After the procedure, I had trouble weaning off the oxygen properly, in addition to the high heart rate again. To be safe, they transferred me to the ICU to more closely monitor me. They also wanted to look for any new blood clots that might have formed by doing an ultrasound of my legs. They started managing my pain with a dose of Tylenol and Celebrex, since I told the ICU doctors the morphine IV wasn't really helping.

The ultrasound confirmed a clot in my right leg, just behind my knee. I had been taking Lovenox (my anti coagulant injection) but having been bed ridden for so long, it was possible to a clot to occur. The doctors strongly suggested I get an IVC filter, which is a little piece of metal that acts much like a sieve to catch blood clots so they don't reach your heart or brain. It is a basic in-patient procedure which they put me under for (again) and took about 15-20 minutes and I went back to ICU.

As I was coming out of my drugged stupor the nurses were trying to adjust me to get me comfortable. I'm not sure what came over me; the pain, the drugs, the almost 4 weeks now that I had been in the hospital... but I finally broke down. I would have given anything to be home in my own bed.

At the same time, I also was noticing speech issues. My wife noticed it too. I was speaking slower and slurring my words, taking long pauses in the middle of sentences, and mixing up words. We figured it was due to me coming off the anesthesia and it would resolve itself.

The next day I was down to very little oxygen assistance, so they moved me back to the oncology floor to prep me for discharge. We needed to first see if I could manage my pain without the morphine pump.