December 16, 2024 to December 17, 2024
Hospitals, Part 2
So let’s compress the narrative a bit, speed things up, and try to outrun this situation. There are many gripping details, but not all need to be retold or remembered.
Monday
Monday morning begins with us in limbo. We understand that we’re waiting to hear from the eye clinic down in Santa Maria, but aren’t sure if we’ll hear today or tomorrow, or whether we should be proactive and call them first. While we’re puzzling over that, the phone rings and answers our question. We’ve got a late morning appointment with an ophthalmologist today so that dictates everything. It leaves us time to do the rounds first though so we stop by CVS, Boo boo Records and the coffee shop hoping that one of those three has my drivers license that mysteriously disappeared on my walkabout yesterday. It’s a strikeout though, as all three turn up empty-handed - as does the city sheriff’s office when we give them a call later. So that’s more than a nuisance. Not only do I not have a drivers license now, but it’s unlikely I could get it renewed without major improvements on the vision thing.
Rachael drives both ways, which is much safer than Saturday ‘s harrowing experience. Not that it’s quite comfortable, because Rachael hasn’t driven on a highway for at least two years. I sit in the passenger seat the whole way, coaching her through the basics of least-risk highway driving strategy and tactics. She does well, getting us down and back again safely but it’s still an anxious experience for both of us.
I’m seen by a different ophthalmologist this time, a woman that makes us think of Saturday’s good doctor. She’s sharp, a good listener, and she too does a double take on hearing of our two dispensations with eyedrops; and also looks at least perplexed at hearing that her colleague here Saturday sent us off with a blister pack of small prednisone tablets instead of ordering us back to the ER for the hard stuff I obviously need.
So that’s where we head immediately - back up the highway to French Hospital, where I’m admitted instantly because they know I’m coming and it’s urgent. And it’s treated as such - within the next hour exams are complete, a plan is formed, I’m set up for the first of three days of intravenously administered super-strength steroids. And somewhere in here around early evening I’m wheeled out to the MRI room where my brain and both eyes are MRI’d. If you’ve ever had an MRI before you know already, but what a bizarre experience it is to hear one loud, percussive sound after another erupting next to your head while you’re encased in this tube for a solid half-hour, doing your best to remain absolutely still so as not to blur the images.
And that’s the day. After a teary goodbye Rachael heads back to the room on foot just before sundown, the first time we’ve slept apart for a very long time. For the rest of the night Dylan the night nurse checks in every two hours and performs some perfunctory tests: test the vital signs, flash a light at my pupils. Test my peripheral vision and so on. In between I perform my own self-exam, testing whether I’m able to read and write emails and manage the sudoku and crossword puzzle on the NYT app. All are successful but a challenge because my vision in my left eye is just barely adequate to the task. The right eye contributes nothing, except more output from its nonstop hallucination generator.
Oh, and I’m finally served up a dinner of sorts - a decent turkey sandwich, and a beverage I’m not surprised to find is just water. When I ask about this I’m offered some alternatives and pick the ginger ale; and since I’m hallucinating anyway I reimagine it as an IPA I’m sharing with Graham Finch somewhere in Cornwall next summer. It’s no big trick really if you’re born without a sense of smell or taste anyway.
I finally go to sleep sometime around midnight, feeling like the fates have it in for me. If you’re missing two of the five senses at birth already it feels like there should be a piling on flag waved if now a third one is being threatened too.
If you’ve been holding your breath like us wondering when the tale will bottom out, I’d say it’s right here. This is the darkest hour.
Tuesday
I awaken this morning to two things - one mundane, one significant. The mundane thing - Dylan has checked out and now I’ve got a new nurse coming in to check my signs every two hours all day long. She’s the first of many new faces I’ll see popping in and out all day - nurses, counselors, PT therapists. The PT therapist checks my stability and then takes me for a walk around the block, giving me a good report on everything except the vision thing. The surgeon who will perform the biopsy tomorrow comes by to discuss the procedure and what to expect. Everyone is considerate, kind and caring. The staff here are wonderful.
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The more significant news: there seems to be some modest improvement in my left eye, and the solid red, orange and blue letters on the poster ten feet away are starting to get some definition. By the time Rachael arrives at about 8 I excitedly tell her that I can just make out what looks like the word WELCOME as the largest, clearest word on the chart. And below it I can just figure out that a different orange line is the row of smiley/frowny faces to rate your pain level. She confirms that by George I’ve got it, and it’s the most optimistic news to come along in several days.
While I eat breakfast she talks about how it went for her at the apartment. It was lonely sleeping alone for her too, but she’s excited to tell me that she saw the house cat again this morning, and that she was touched by the kindness and consideration of our host Alicia. The woman knows something of what’s going on with us, and when Rachael returned last night she was welcomed by a gift basket of fresh fruit and a sympathy card - and then they shared a weepy period discussing our situation and get acquainted.
Not much longer into the morning we start talking about what to do with all the time we’ll be sharing at this small bedside table and I’m inspired to see if they have a deck of cards we could buy or borrow. She’s out the door and returns five minutes later with the goods:
It hasn’t all been about the bike with us of course. We really had a more rounded lifestyle when we were younger and still active in our professional careers. The first thing that brought us together though was a deck of cards - we met the day after I returned home from my solo ride from Cedar City to Flagstaff when she, a new hire in my absence, stopped by to kibbitz at the lunchtime bridge game.
Playing cards games - socially, competitively, and as a pastime - was a part of our lives for probably the next fifteen years. We became reasonably competent duplicate bridge players, both attaining our Life Master certificates before we finally gave it up when we moved to Portland. We were recognized as a rare breed, a couple who could play bridge together without constantly putting each other down. My parents were also duplicate bridge players and I would just cringe when they came home after a frustrating night at the table. I came to ish they would just get divorced and put an end to it.
It wasn’t like that for Rachael and me though. We were a great team, always on each other’s side. I have many warm memories of those years, often blending our passion for cycling with our bridge outings. We would bike from our home in Salem to the bridge club across the Willamette River and then bike home again after dark - and on one memorable evening we biked home with all the scoresheets for the night’s game after I absent-mindedly pocketed them. The phone was ringing when we entered the door at home, with the director wanting to know if I had them so they could complete scoring and folks could go home.
And we would use bridge tournaments as opportunities for weekend biking getaways. We would drive over to Bend or Redmond or Ashland or Hood River or Newport or Astoria, fit in a few rounds at the tournament, hopefully score some points toward our Life Master goal, and then hop on the bikes for a ride. It was all great.
Closer to home though, one-on-one games were a staple of our personal lives. On many if not most evenings when we were home alone we would break out the deck for a game of gin, cribbage or honeymoon bridge. And we always carried a deck with us on the road. Thirty five years later, it still chafes at me that she somehow beat me in fifteen straight games of cribbage as we traveled through New England and Nova Scotia on our first anniversary bike tour.
Somewhere along the way though we finally dropped the habit, and we probably haven’t cracked a new deck of cards in at least a decade. It takes us a few practice hands before we tease out how to play gin again - the themes, draws and discards, how to keep score, but after about three or four false starts it comes back and I’m pretty sure we’ve rediscovered the rules that we after all more or less created for ourselves anyway long ago. We made it through two games, winning one each. She’s ahead on the running score though, by a single point - 112-111. It’s a warm feeling, reconnecting to an almost forgotten part of our lives. I suspect it will fill a role in the days and years to come.
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We’re not done at the hospital yet - there’s still a third day of steroids ahead as well as tomorrow morning’s date with Jason to receive a new scar or two - but it’s clear that we need to be moving on soon. Our insurance covers emergency services like this but not externals like those visits to the ophthalmologist down in Santa Maria so we need to get back to Oregon as soon as possible. There’s a lot of brainstorming, starting with the obvious - we won’t be driving home. I obviously can’t drive, and even if Rachael got back in practice enough we wouldn’t want to drive the rough the madness around the Bay Area. But above all that, it’s too slow. We can’t take a week driving north. We spend a lot of the afternoon brainstorming, studying flight and Amtrak schedules, considering ideas like hiring a driver to chauffeur us home, calling friends to test out possibilities. It’s a complex puzzle that fills the afternoon, but in the end we’ve formed a tentative plan that gets filed away until the hospital says it’s time to move on.
Oh, and one more vital bit of news comes in when I’m informed that the MRI results are in, and they’re all negative. There’s no evidence of a stroke or aneurism in my brain or either eye. It still leaves open the door to hope for real improvement, though of course it’s only a hope for the moment until more is known.
Our day together ends when it’s time for Rachael to leave so she can walk back to our lonely apartment before it gets dark. before she leaves I stop in the bathroom and pause to take a selfie. It’s got a bit of that sciarascuro feel, in a fitting way - darker on the darker side, lighter on the light.
Later, the night nurse brings my evening meal and reminds me that I’m to have nothing to eat or drink after midnight so I’ll be empty for my date with surgery at 9 in the morning; and they remind me that I’m not to take my blood thinner so there’s no uncontrolled bleeding messing up the scene tomorrow either.
The optimism that brightened the morning has gradually dimmed throughout the day though. I don’t mention it to Rachael, but my recognition of WELCOME on the board in front of me proves to be a high-water mark for the day. By the time I finally give it up for the night the smiley/frowny faces have blended back together again, so that’s discouraging. Closer up though I do see improvement. The clues are clearer when I work the crossword puzzle, it’s easier to read and write emails and scribble up an entry in the blog, so that’s a hopeful sign - if those damn hallucinations would just quiet down. Shoo, puppy! You’re cute, but I know you’re a phantom.
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A footnote. As many of you know, I’ve been posting emailed updates to friends for whom I had addresses for. I wanted to spare them the shock of reading about what’s happened by just stumbling across it in the blog. There’s not really any additional information to share from this, but I want to preserve the emails themselves as another window into the experience.
December 15:
Hey, friends. Team Anderson has some sad news to report. I’m emailing you all because I know you’ll be concerned and sympathetic, and I don’t want you to just find out when the blog gets caught up. For some of you this is a repeat notification, but I’ve included you again so we don’t get flooded with queries about why we’re forgetting Susan and Suzanne for example. And because we have a cat photo to share now. We spent much of yesterday in the ER after I suddenly lost much of my vision in my right eye. After a pair of CT scans of my head and a variety of other tests, the diagnosis is that I have suffered an ‘eye stroke’, something I’d never heard of before. I’ve got a follow up appointment with the opthamologist next week, but the prognosis is poor for any significant improvement. It looks likely that this is a permanent condition and vision in my right eye will be severely limited. In a cruel bit of irony or black humor, this occurred on Friday the 13th and the very day after I bagged my 300th bird of the year. So we don’t really know what we’ll be doing in the future beyond our immediate plans. For now we’re scrapping the trip to Tucson and heading back north to Portland. We’ll stay there for at least a month while I check in with my home doctors and we assess our new normal before deciding what’s ahead. As dark as this sounds, we’re confident that we’ll be fine once we’ve adapted to our changed situation. We’re both very flexible and resilient by nature and we’ll still find plenty to value in whatever lies ahead. And, best of all, we have each other. In sickness and in health, and all that.
Love,Scott and Rachael
December 17:
Hi again. This is probably the last time I’ll send a broad spectrum email out on our situation, but I thought I’d give you another heads up because the next pair of posts will both be pretty dark. I thought I’d let you know where things stand, because things definitely look more promising today. As an aside though, I’d like to save this list now that I’ve compiled it. Could someone who knows coach me through creating a Gmail email list? No doubt it’s simple, but simpler to ask someone who knows. Maybe Steve Grampy, who maintains a similar lengthy list. I’ll leave it to the blog to fill in many blanks, but the short story is I’ve been a resident in French Hospital here in SLO for the last two days, after my second admission to the ER. Between this and two drives south to an ophthalmologist over the last five days I’ve been subjected to many tests - blood tests, vision tests, eye exams, CT scans of my head, and an MRI of my brain and both eyes. The short story though is that they have a tentative diagnosis now and will perform a biopsy tomorrow morning to hopefully confirm their opinion. One important finding is that they see no evidence of a stroke or aneurism, obviously excellent news. So if it’s not an eye stroke, why do they think I’ve lost nearly all vision in my right eye and have significantly reduced visual acuity in the other? They believe I have another condition I’d never heard of before: temporal arteritis, a serious autoimmune disease of the arteries in the head. The biopsy will take samples from one or both lateral arteries, so regardless of the determination I’ll have a couple of possibly lengthy scars along the hairline on both sides of my head and I’ll likely start wearing my hair longer. Jen Gumby will like that - she’s always been after me to grow it out for some reason. It’s a serious condition that can cause partial or total loss of vision. The good news is that it often responds to steroids; and in fact there’s been a significant improvement in my left eye since my first treatment yesterday, when I couldn’t even make out the letter on the top row of the eye chart. Today it’s improved enough that I can easily read and write on the iPad, do the crossword puzzle, Rachael’s beautiful face and smile are coming back into focus, and large print words are starting to be readable within about ten feet. It doesn’t sound like much but it feels game changing. I could adapt to biking in some form if it was no worse than this. Prognosis is unknown and broad spectrum. Anything from loss of sight to complete restoration in either or both eyes is on the table, so we’re in a wait and hope mode. The immediate plan is that we’ll fly home to Salem soon after I’m released, probably this weekend, and then pick up with my home medical coverage. The one thing that seems certain now is that I’ll be on steroids for awhile, perhaps permanently. Wish us luck.
Love to all,Scott and Rachael
December 17:
Liz and George, meet Bruce and Andrea! George, I’m sorry we’ve never picked up your email address but I trust Liz to link you in. First off, a huge expression of thanks to all of you for helping us out in our time of need. We’re humbled by your generosity and openness to help on such short notice - especially to our new friends whom we only met last year by a pure act of serendipity. We’re luckier than we deserve.
And to further introduce Liz and George to Andrea and Bruce, here’s the most recent of their remarkable bike journeys to Southeast Asia. You four should spend some time to get acquainted when you exchange the keys. I think you’d find a lot to talk about. If any good photos come out of this, please send them my way and I’ll include them in the blog.
So here’s the plan. We expect to be flying back to Portland possibly as early as this weekend. I’ll let you all know when we’ve picked a date and booked a flight. Before then we’ll drop off the keys, the Raven, and the Rodriguez with Liz and George. They have many contacts in the SLO cycling community and are confident they can find a way to take him off my hands because even without the eyesight issue I’m realizing it’s not as safe a ride for me any more. I’m safer on the BF with its lower frame and step through architecture.
So they’ll keep the keys until Bruce and Andrea fly down to pick it up, probably after the holidays. I’ll trust you all to figure out how to contact and communicate with each other. Probably better than putting me in the middle and screwing something up.
Bruce and Andrea and the Gumbys (who I CC’d), doesn’t this remind you of the great Capital One Refund Challenge back in the Covid year? I love thinking back on that saga, something I’d totally forgotten about. Thank god for the journal!
Let me know if you need anything else from us, and I’ll let you know when we’ll be flying home. HAC meetup next month, assuming Bruce and Andrea don’t stretch out their junket too long.
Love to you all, Team Anderson
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I hope the best birder I know gets enough eyesight back to keep looking at our feathered friends! It would be nice to know someone with real bird (and other nature) knowledge is around to back up my meager, sometimes off target efforts. Get well soon!
Oh, and it would be great if you get well enough to start touring again!
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Great that you are back to playing cards. Janos and I play EVERY DAY! It's our ritual after lunch and I always look forward to it. We play Schnapsen and I found a link that explains the game in English.
https://vipgames.com/blog/schnapsen-a-trick-taking-classic-for-two-players/ It's a great game.
I'm sure it would be easy for you two to learn as exerienced bridge players. If you have time to kill, give it a try. We could even try the version for four when we get together again.
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