ID, WWF, WWE & M&M

Just a side note: You know you have a good sister-in-law when she smuggles peanut M&Ms and bottles of Coca-Cola into the hospital for you.

In an effort to decide why my white blood count is off the charts the powers that be decided to send an Infectious Disease Specialist in to see me. Can you imagine being my roommate and hearing that they are sending an infectious disease guy in to see me. I would be buzzing that bellhop to call the front desk and ask to have my luggage moved immediately but dear Rose just took it in stride. (Another side note...Never judge a 75 year old woman by her choice of television programming. The night I was wheeled into the room Rose was watching WWF which I found out is now WWE. Seems they have changed their name from World Wrestling Federation to World Wrestling Entertainment to emphasize the "entertainment value". I am just going to leave that one alone.) In spite of her television choices she was a delight in her own grumbly way and good for quite a few laughs.

The ID doctor decided there was no infectious disease issue which led to the neuro doctor deciding to have the lab take blood to grow a few blood cultures. I told them they could take what they wanted, but that all that was going to grow from my blood was sunflowers. I think they probably think I was on the wrong floor of the hospital, if you know what I mean. I also took to drawing things on their write-on, wipe-off memo boards. My last drawing was of a person in scrubs and a nurse's cap with fangs, huge bat wings and a huge hypodermic needle tucked under a wing, dripping blood all over the floor. This made even my one stoic no-nonsense HCA smile. I never actually admitted to being the culprit but it was fairly obvious since I was pretty much the only patient on the neuro-ortho floor who could walk by myself. I felt like a Weeble..."Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down."

On Friday I rode the V-Bus to MRI land again. This time they injected me with an enhancer so that the lesion in my neck would show up better. My wonderful night nurse had taken out the IV needle the night before because it was making the bone in my hand hurt. As fate would have it, the one time they might have needed to use the IV it was gone, so they just injected the enhancer with a hypodermic needle. No big deal. I had been poked so many times by then that one more certainly didn't matter.

Late Friday morning my Neuro came in to tell me that the MRI of my thoracic spine indeed showed another lesion and that this one enhanced, which I guess tells them it is still active and the culprit that was contributing to all my symptoms. Likely Diagnosis: Multiple Sclerosis

Armed with this information, I was thrown out of the hospital on Friday evening. I still had difficulty walking and they hadn't even decided on a treatment plan for me. You are, I'm sure, aware that the insurance companies know best what a patient needs and mine decided that I needed to go home.