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Crazy. Terrifying. Exhausting. Miraculous. Those are just a few of the words I use to describe the last few weeks. What started as Glenn complaining about a sore elbow ended up with him getting out of the hospital ten days later, after five days in the ICU. He contracted a rare form of strep - beta hemolytic strep A that led to Toxic Shock Syndrome. He was a very sick man for a while. But the good news is that he's home now and getting stronger every day.
Glenn has asked me to write down as much as I can remember so that I can help him fill in the blanks. He was never completely unconscious but there are details that I knew that he probably didn't know at the time. It's taken me two weeks to get up the nerve to write this all down because there are still parts that I don't want to remember anymore. But here we go.
Late Saturday afternoon (Feb. 11), Glenn came upstairs after playing catch with Trigger and mentioned that his elbow was a little sore. He thought he pulled a muscle or strained something but it was a little weird because he hadn't fallen or banged his elbow on anything. About an hour after that, he noticed the elbow was a little swollen so we put ice on it and went about our night. A few hours after THAT, the elbow was really hurting and he started to shiver. I immediately thought that he had broken the elbow and was in fact, going into shock. I tried to talk him into going to the ER but he wouldn’t, of course. We watched a movie. We went to bed. A few minutes later, Glenn started vomiting. We thought that he finally had caught the stomach flu that the kids and I had a few weeks before. He was sick all night.
Fast forward to Sunday morning. Glenn is weak and pale and unable to keep anything in his stomach. His elbow is also pretty swollen. I start trying to find someone to watch the kids so I can take him to our local drive-thru doctor’s office. My sister points out that we’d be better off at the ER, so we meet her there and she takes the kids and Glenn gets checked into the Emergency Room.
At first, the doctors are perplexed by his symptoms. The general consensus is that he has hurt his elbow and he has a pretty bad bout of the stomach flu. Considering the rest of us had it a few weeks ago, it wasn’t a stretch. But as the blood tests come back, it is clear that other things are going on. He sees an emergency room doctor and an orthopedic surgeon, who takes a look at the elbow. They both think he has a bad infection in the elbow and start him on some antibiotics. He's also on iv fluids because he's severely dehydrated. After a few hours in the ER, the doctors tell us that he's going to be admitted to the hospital. They tell us that he's very sick.
By mid-afternoon on Sunday, Glenn is tucked away in a room on the 4th floor of the hospital. The 4th floor is where people recover from surgery or spend a few days getting over the flu or some other serious infection. He's hooked up to some fluids and given medicine for the pain in his elbow. He has no food restrictions but doesn't feel like eating much except a bowl of soup. He has a high fever (103), his blood pressure is pretty low and his heart rate is high. His elbow has really swollen, in fact his entire arm is starting to swell. Glenn is pretty lethargic and quiet. In fact one of friends comments that he knows Glenn doesn't feel well because he's never sat with him for that long and not heard him ask anybody any questions! By evening, the doctors have determined that he has sepsis - a fancy word for an infection in the blood. They are taking cultures from his blood to try to figure out what kind of infection it is but those results won't be back for a few days. The orthopedic surgeon tells us that they'll do surgery on his elbow the following morning if the swelling hasn't gone down. I'm starting to feel a little scared. I watch the evening shift nurse watching Glenn and I think that he (the nurse) must be really be concerned about Glenn. He watches Glenn breathe rapidly and spends several minutes just observing his vital signs. The doctors warn us that they might have to put Glenn in Intensive Care (ICU) if they can't get his blood pressure under control.
Sunday night, one of our good friends stays with Glenn so that I can go home and be with the kids. I don't think any of us slept very well. Monday morning I drop the kids off at school and head to the hospital. Glenn is alert and talkative and he seems to be feeling better than the day before. The nurses let us know that his surgery has been moved to the top of the priority list. After he's wheeled away to be prepped for surgery the surgeon meets with me and tells me that they are very worried about the infection and they want to open up his arm as soon as they can. The doctor is concerned that Glenn might be infected with a flesh eating bacteria that attacks the soft tissue. I ask the doctor if it could affect Glenn's use of his arm in the future and the doctor kindly but firmly tells me that at this point, his arm is the least of their worries.
While Glenn's in surgery, my mom and sister and a few friends sit with me to help pass the time. After about two hours, the surgeon comes back and says that Glenn's doing well. The infection wasn't as bad in the elbow as they thought, but that also means that they still aren't sure why he is so sick. There was also no sign of the flesh-eating bacteria so that's good news. The doctor tells me that Glenn will be back on the 4th floor in an hour and we head up there to wait for him.
We wait about two hours and the nurse comes to tell us that Glenn has been moved to the ICU. She doesn't have any details so we pack up his room, take the stuff to the car and then go up to the 6th floor (ICU) to wait for him. After at least another hour or more in the waiting room, a nurse comes to tell us that they are getting him settled in the ICU and the doctor will come get me soon. I honestly don't remember if she warned us that he was very ill but Glenn remembers there being a lot of concerned activity around him and one of the doctors saying that they needed to talk to his family as soon as possible. You'll have to bear with me, this is where the story gets a little fuzzy at times.
The doctor came out to the waiting room and asked me to come back with him. I so wish that I would have brought Vicky with me because the next several minutes were very scary. The doctor showed me an x-ray of Glenn's lungs and said that they were very worried that infection had scarred the lungs but that only time would tell if it was fluid or scarring. They took me back into his room and it was all I could do to not faint from fear and shock. Glenn was very swollen. His face was barely recognizable. His blood pressure had been dangerously low in the operating room and they had pumped a lot of fluids into him in an attempt to get it up. He was on a CPAP machine that forced air into his nose and mouth to help him breath. He could talk but it was hard to understand him through the machine. The doctors explained that he was very, very sick. They said that the sepsis was affecting all of his organs and they would not know for a while if the damage was permanent. I think batted around the phrase multiple organ failure . I needed to sit in a chair after that. They cautioned me that they might have to put him on a ventilator (which they so cheerily referred to as 'life support') to breathe for him so that his body could rest. I don't mean to sound hard on the doctors. We discovered as the week went by that ICU doctors are a different breed. They aren't as concerned about bedside manner because their primary goal is to keep people alive. I appreciated their honesty and while it was hard to hear at times, it was important for us to have an accurate picture of what was going on.
I sat with Glenn for a few minutes and then went back out to try to tell everyone what was happening. I didn't do a very good job at that because I was overwhelmed by the news but my sister took over gallantly and spread the word and rounded up the troops. Those were definitely the scariest hours of my life. The doctors told us that Glenn was exactly where he needed to be. They were keeping him pumped full of several types of antibiotics. They were also testing him for a variety of bacterias and viruses. The tests were still inconclusive.
A friend drove me to pick up the kids and I spent a few hours at home with them before heading back to the ICU. Glenn was still on the CPAP machine so talking was difficult. We watched tv but I spent most of time watching the machine with all of his vital signs. I can still remember the order, heartrate, respiratory rate, blood pressure and temperature. The temperature was tracked in Celsius but it didn't take long for us to remember what it correlated to in Fahrenheit.
There's not a place for overnight guests in the ICU so I headed home. I had given the nurse my cell phone number and told him to call me the minute anything changed. I slept fitfully with the phone in my hand and finally called them at 5:00 a.m. to see how Glenn was doing. The nurse told me that Glenn had a good night - no major changes. I was relieved but not enough to go back to sleep. One of our friends offered to take the kids to school so I dropped them off early and headed to the hospital.
The doctors had warned us that Glenn might get worse before he gets better so we all waited for that to happen. Fortunately as the hours went on, he seemed more stable. He was able to only need the CPAP machine at night, he just used an oxygen cannula during the day. (See how comfortable I am throwing out these medical terms now?) His vital signs stayed steady and while he still had a serious fever, nothing was getting any worse. I posted on Facebook that night. "Doctor told us today that he's not out of the woods, but he can see the sun through the trees. We are holding on to those words tonight."
Wednesday morning, the doctors had some good news. They identified the bacteria and happily they had been treating it correctly the whole week. Glenn was diagnosed with beta hemalytic strep A that led to toxic shock syndrome (TSS). The TSS can come on very quickly and accounted for why all of this had happened so suddenly. They said that he seemed to be responding to the treatment. Doctors said that we might never know how he contracted it. It could have been a hangnail or a small scratch that he didn't even notice. It was like winning the reverse lottery. Vicky took this picture of us Wednesday night in the ICU. I was so relieved when they finally had a diagnosis. The swelling in Glenn's face had gone down.
Picture below: the next night in the ICU. Glenn's fever would rise as the day progressed. If it got above 102.5, they'd make him lie on a cooling blanket which he hated. We used ice packs to try to keep it below that level. I thought he looked particularly jaunty with one on his head.
Here are some of the wierd facts we learned in the ICU: One nurse told Glenn that he had more tests run than any other patient at the hospital. While the doctors were trying to figure everything out, Glenn was tested for anthrax, brucellosis, tuleremia and the plague. Another nurse told him that he broke the record for the most blood drawn in a single day (35). A doctor told us later that he was the sickest man in Cheyenne on Monday night. A doctor told my dad that he was the sickest man in Cheyenne who survived. Gulp. If Glenn hadn’t had medical attention immediately, he wouldn’t have made it. If he was 65 or an infant, he wouldn’t have made it. This was a completely random event. There’s nothing that he could have down to avoid getting it. The Strep A came in to his body through a scratch, a hangnail, a tiny cut that he didn’t see.
Glenn spent the rest of the week in the ICU and was released back to the 4th floor on Friday, February 18. Glenn's brother and niece drove out that day to help me with the kids and take turns at the hospital. It was so nice to have them there. I can't do justice here to recognize all of the amazing people that we have in our lives. My sister and her husband, my mom and dad, Glenn's brother and his family, Glenn's parents, our friends near and far, our co-workers, everyone gave us so much support. The ICU is supposed to be limited to immediate family and the staff must think that Glenn and I have a dozen brothers and sisters between us for all of the people that we brought up there. While he was in the ICU, Glenn was rarely sitting in his room alone. My sister coordinated a complicated rotating shift of people sitting with Glenn, supporting me, bringing food over, walking Trigger, staying with the kids, and even running errands for us. It made such a hard time so much easier.
Once he was back on the 4th floor, his recovery moved along at a comfortable pace. By Saturday, he was up and walking with some assistance. He was incredibly weak and his appetite took a big hit.
Here's a picture of Sunday. You can see that his face looks much better but there was still a significant amount of swelling in his legs and feet. They gave him medicine to get all of that extra fluid out and the walking helped too.
By Sunday, he was walking a few laps around the hospital floor and requesting soup from our favorite Chinese place. Monday, the doctors indicated that he could probably go home within a few days. On Tuesday, they proclaimed that there wasn't anything he couldn't do at home and they sent us on our way.In the last few days, Glenn has made amazing strides. He is such a strong guy! He's walked on our treadmill every day and even ventured outside for some fresh air. His appetite is coming back and I'm doing my best to put more pounds on him. I am just so happy to have him back home. As you can see in the picture below, I'm not the only one.....
Last Sunday, when Will was finally feeling better, I wanted to take a picture of his skinny face. He lost about four pounds and it was noticeable for the first few days. It's nice to see his smile back after all of the droopiness. 