Thursday, September 2, 2010

Hospital holiday

So since my plans for the long labor day weekend seemed like too much fun, I decided to just have myself hospitalized instead. Otherwise, I might enjoy myself a little too much.
If you've been keeping up, you can probably guess that the CT Wednesday morning did not go terribly well. They found some sort of abscess in my mediastinum that is excerting pressure on my esophagus and trachea, and displacing my esophagus slightly. Hence the swallowing problems ive been experiencing. The abscess seems to be a pocket of fluid, about 3x5 cm, though they cannot determine the nature of the fluid and are not sure if it is infectious. So the solution is to go in and drain the abscess and test the fluid to see what we are dealing with.
And that is where the fun begins. I'm on an interventional pulmonary service, and so far they've consulted with interventional radiology, cardiothoracic surgeons, and the ENT team. No one seems particularly excited to tackle the problem. CT Surgery is deferring because their procedure would be the most invasive. But ENT insists that the abscess is too far down and out of their specialty range. And IR doesn't think they can get at the abscess because it is blocked by lots of blood vessels and major arteries. So by default it looks like it's going to be cardiothoracic, though they are consulting with other ct surgeons to determine who should have a go and how best to attack the abscess.
So, having checked into the hospital yesterday around 4, ive been here 20 hours, seen about a dozen docs, and there is still no real plan. Basically I'm just sitting in my lovely hospital room with it's shitty tv waiting to hear back from cardiothoracic. They may schedule something for tomorrow or maybe not untill next week. If they push it back to next week, I will probably insist on going home for the weekend, but we shall see.
I'll keep you posted.

3 comments:

  1. at least you have your iPad...?

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  2. i hope they figure things out ASAP. hospitals = no fun. feel good, chris! thinking of you.

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  3. Hey bro.

    Hope all goes well.

    All the R's (and of course KD & myself) have been thinking about you.

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