Time flies when indisposed. I’ve been overwhelmed by balancing the appointments and the health needed to do them.
Until my body started to fail, then it was all I could do to endure.
The worker was unable to hear my whispered calls for help, from my weak lungs. They set the fan to blow on me as I struggled to speak, to move, to do anything in my paralyzed body to let them know ‘I’m here, help!”
Time flows fast around the working eye, and I hear her shut the out door. I still couldn’t move anything except my eyelid. But I could feel the lung deterioration, progressing into diaphragm breakdown.
I held on. I endured. For an hour or more there was an explosion from my limbs and torso of nerve pain, perhaps it is what locked up the diaphragm, or sprained it.
To lie there, unable to move, with Linda having a work day, not home for three hours, that is just something to bear. But when the pain came, unable to moan, unable to move, and too terrified to close that eye and let go, then it was a fight. I would not fall silent into that dark night. I told myself that I must hold on. I hallucinated, thinking I was in a war, wounded, left behind.
I prayed. Mostly thank you’s for the people known, for the time I’ve been able to spend with Linda, and others. My life seemed very short now. All my plans and hopes of what to read or see, or emails I hoped to write or read seemed so far away. I thought about it all, “Darn it” I thought, and I sipped what air I could.
I did it. I held on until Linda came home, my lips moving over and over, ‘help me’, ‘help me.’
She leaned over and and I could see part of her face with my eye. She said, “Looks like you’ve had a TIA” (TIA is a mini stoke). I couldn’t see a way out or through this. I kept saying, ‘I love you’ until I was sure she had read my lips.
I didn’t want her ever doubting what I was most thankful for, or what mattered. I couldn't see a way out of this, a way back to the diminished life I am thankful to have.
Linda promised to watch over me and my breathing. So I risked sleeping, but how much I did of that, and how much was hallucinations due to the pain, and lack of oxygen is hard to tell. Linda noted that the breathing was shorter, shorter and erratic while I slept. So weak I could not drink. So Linda used a straw to suck up Gatorade then hold it with her finger on top before dripping the drops into my mouth. I needed the calories to try and get some basic function. Late hours but I still couldn’t move, drifting in and out. The bed was raised so I could swallow the mouthful of Gatorade, then lowered so I could breathe. My stomach was bloated from air swallowed in sleep. This air was squeezing my lungs, stopping them from inhaling.
I was able, then, to take the breakthrough pain pill with Linda putting it in my mouth, and dripping in Gatorade. My jawbone snapped out of the hinges by my ear, as it had for the last 10 hours. The pain had made most muscles locked in extreme tension.
Take your arm, make a fist and squeeze as hard as you can. Feel that tension in your muscle? Remember what a leg cramp feels like. Imagine a cramp going on for an hour. Impossible? Not if it is paralyzed that way, locked with muscles in full contraction for nine hours.
There are things we think are unbearable until they are endured. 'Longsuffering' the bible calls it. Thank goodness the Fentynal had been increased last week.
As the calories grew, things got a bit better, which also meant worse. The muscles started to drop, to release. My body relaxed, and it was like I was being pressed in medieval days, a board on me, with stones added. The only muscles that moved were the ones which twitched uncontrollably from the lactic acid which had built up.
I was faint, dizzy, but I could move my head, and I was starting to get parts of my body back. Linda put my legs, knees up, then swung me so they were off the bed. A tilt of the torso and I fell forward, Linda catching me, as we stagger, my one leg under control, to a cool room.
My hands and lips purple from lack of oxygen, but I started to be able to breath, a little deeper as I cooled down and every bit of calories. It took another three hours. Linda had been caring for four hours. I never would have gotten that care in a care home. But I slowly started to get better.
I couldn’t control my arms well, they would twitch and go in and out of spasm from the hours of muscle tension. I let my head loll on the headrest.
Linda put what we did down in the ‘solutions’ book, because we know neither why it work nor why my lungs declined so severely and so quickly. But it worked, and we hope if that happens, it will work again.
Please, never let it happen again.
I will start blogging regular as I can get out of bed. I’ll show pictures and write of Sakura-con and the trip as I have the ability and strength, if that is okay. I thought I ‘had’ to do the BIG Sakura-con blog, but now I’ll do ‘little posts’.
I worked today a little on my new birthday goal: some new disabled parking spaces in Victoria. There is no rule in Victoria, BC for blue badge spaces so no one makes them. The workers call for me. I talk to owners. I have more owners to go, then the council, and try to win over one parking spot at a time. Right now, there are several thousand street parking spots, and 28 disabled spots in Victoria. Every parking spot in every lot is a gift for all.
But that is another ‘small post’. I’m glad to here. Here is good, today better than yesterday.
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