The Worst Month of My Life (Continued)

I thought Claudia would leave CICU shortly after she started breathing on her own, but the doctors had other ideas. You see, now the problem was with her heart, or, rather, with her blood pressure.

It was way too high. The doctors were pumping bottle after bottle of nitroglycerine into her body (through the IV) to keep her blood pressure down. And even with that, it was way too high.

The doctors were completely freaking out. They talked gloom and doom - it was a major problem according to them. Of course, this made me extremely upset, as it appeared that her life was still in immediate and extreme danger.

I had gotten into the habit of walking over to the hospital each day to check up on Claudia and to find out if the doctors were doing anything stupid. One morning I walked in and found a respiratory therapist about to work on Claudia. I asked if I could watch, and the lady said it was fine with her.

I watched as she performed various tests and changed tubing. It was very interesting and I pestered the poor therapist with questions and comments. Fortunately, she was very willing to talk and I learned a lot about what was going on with my wife. In fact, during the entire stay in the hospital, I learned far more from the therapists and was far more impressed with them as professionals than I was by any doctor. It was interesting that this hospital had such babbling idiots for doctors, yet somehow they had managed to find competent people to fill the ranks (at least at CICU - I later found out it was very different elsewhere in this hell hole).

Anyway, as the lady worked I mentioned Claudia's high blood pressure and fast pulse rate. The therapist listened politely as I spoke, then sighed and said the doctors never explain anything. What was going on, she explained, was very simple. Claudia's lungs were damaged and they were not bringing in enough oxygen. The body had some automatic systems and these systems understood this fact. In order to keep the brain alive, the body was simply trying to pump more oxygen faster to compensate for the lung problem. In other words, what was going on was completely understandable. Dangerous perhaps, and definitely the blood pressure had to be controlled. But the phenomenon was understood and relatively routine - at least for the therapist.

It took a few more days, but her blood pressure finally returned to more-or-less normal range. Claudia began looking better and appeared more alive than before. At some point, they worked her off the medications and she woke up - well, as much as she could wake up given the amount of drugs they had fed her.

Within a few more days it was time to move Claudia out of CICU. This meant she was doing much better, and was expected to survive. I thought, at first, that moving to another floor would be a step up, but I was very mistaken.

Claudia was moved to the forth floor and the situation was dismal. She was put into a room with another person who was obviously dying. In fact, it was pretty plan that the old lady was being allowed to die, and she did expire within a day. Claudia was forced to listen to this person as she went through the motions of dying, and it was extremely traumatic for her.

Her roommate expired and Claudia was left alone. I visited often, and each time the situation was slightly worse.

Claudia was throwing temper-tantrums. She didn't want the breathing machine hooked to her, so she would throw it to the floor. She didn't want breathing treatments, she didn't want food, she didn't want anything - except to leave this hell-hole of a hospital.

You have to remember that the doctors had injected Claudia with a tremendous amount of drugs to keep her sedated. The effects of those drugs lasted for months and months, and during the few remaining days in the hospital, Claudia felt like she was a small child. She really felt like she was five years old, and she acted like a five year old. It was simply the effects of the sedatives, as proven by the fact that as the drugs wore off, she became much more rational and "there".

The nurses were very unhappy with Claudia, and they used restraints to keep her from moving around. The doctors asked them to remove the restraints and told Claudia she needed to practice walking. When she did so and fell, the nurses freaked out and kept her restrained and under close supervision.