nickOliva.com

October 22, 2009

Playing with my son after a long stay in the hospital

Filed under: Health, Life — Nick Oliva @ 9:48 pm
Tags: , 
"Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, ease after warre...."
         - The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser

… and playing with my son after a long stay in the hospital.

There’s something magical about returning home to the ones you love.

I was three weeks in the hospital – though I was unconscious the first ten days in ICU. The last five days I was in a private isolation room getting over the pneumonia I contracted for having been on a ventilator for so long – it’s what happens in hospitals. During that time I was also building up my strength and learning to walk with a specially cut shoe for my left foot and crutches – since the super-deluxe, advanced technology ICU bed’s devices for keeping my limbs from being in the same position for too long actually created a blister the size and shape of a computer mouse on the bottom of my left foot. I am not, by the way, exaggerating the size of the blister – not one of the hundred doctors and nurses I saw said they had ever seen anything like it.

I was discharged this afternoon and got home around 5 pm. A couple of hours at home and the hospital feels months away: the magic of returning home. Port after stormie seas….

Thanks again to everyone that has reached out for the kind thoughts. There are side effects from the meds I’ll be on over the next year that may become noticeable – so nobody be too surprised. However, I consider this episode over and don’t really expect to go into it again. My plan is to go back to posting silly things and pictures of Nico… and, of course, heckling my brother on Facebook. ;-)

October 20, 2009

I ask that my brother be my keeper

Filed under: Health — Nick Oliva @ 11:37 am
Tags: , ,

And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?
And he [God] said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.
– Genesis 4: 9-10 (KJV)

UPDATE Nov 2, 2009: I’m not religious, of course, but I used a religious reference that I didn’t cite and not everyone gets or remembers.

I’m writing this from an isolation room at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Through bad luck, bad decisions, bad timing, a little bit of denial, conflicting opinions and statements of doctors, and more bad decisions caused by sleep deprivation brought on by the disease’s symptoms, I wound up at the last stage of a rare, fatal vascular disease.

I’m checking out in two days after more than two weeks in here. The disease is now controlled and I expect to live a perfectly normal, somewhat over-medicated life. I plan to write again about the reasons I’m here and the experience, but this post is about my brother.

Before they tubed me and sent me under, the doctors asked if I had, or wanted to specify, a “health care proxy”. This is a person who is empowered to make medical decisions on my behalf. I said, “My brother, Nelson Oliva.” Then I went under.

Mine was the “case of the week” at the hospital. I’m something of a celebrity. It took many, many teams of many, many doctors to put Nick back together again. All those doctors needed approvals for things I don’t even want to know about. Nelson took calls day and night, called his doctor friends for advice, had his doctor friends call the hospital for details, and kicked some ass whenever it looked like something wasn’t happening that needed to be.

After I was de-tubed, there were plenty of things to deal with and facilitate. Specialists I needed to see. Rehab to schedule… a million things. I’d send Nelson a txt message and a little while later everything was resolved.

Thanks, Sauce [we've always called each other, "Sauce"]. I put my life in your hands and you came through in a big way.

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