Get Ready to NOT Believe This!

Bill is back in the hospital.

And I don't even know where!

This has to be brief, because this one was of the hardest days I have ever lived through, and my brain is fried. I promise more details tomorrow.

Basically, we drove home. Halfway home, Bill started having worse and worse pain in his abdomen, near the area where they had pulled out his stomach tube last night at 2 am.

They then released him from the hospital this morning WITHOUT HIS HAVING EATEN SOLID FOOD! Yeah. He went from an IV bag to the CAR!
Is that even LEGAL?

So halfway home, he starts having these increasingly bad abdominal pains.

Skipping all the details for now, we get home after a long drive (that issue didn't happen because he asked for a pain pill before he left Duke, and since it was an opiate, it had the identical effect of Imodium, which they refused to give us. YOU figure it out, because I can't!)

So thank GOD we didn't have that all the way home. It was a miracle. Really.

So a half hour after we get home and greet our happy pups, a home health nurse comes by. She is about to admit Bill into home health care, but she looks at him, and he looks really bad--yellow again, enlarged abdomen, hard abdomen, and in excruciating pain like, he says, he hadn't experienced in all the time in the hospital!

She says, he has to go to the ER right now. Something is really wrong.

So I said I'd drive him. She says, No! Im calling an ambulance.

Are you KIDDING ME? Am I dreaming this?

Next thing I know, a bunch of EMTs and a stretcher are in my house, Bill is yelling in agony, sweating, pale, horrible situation, and they take him to Watauga Medical Center in Boone, to the ER. I follow by car.

By 9:30 pm, they found out he has a whopping intestinal obstruction and apparently should NEVER have been released from the hospital!?

Next thing I know, they talk to Duke and the last thing I heard was that they were about 100 percent sure they were taking him by AMBULANCE all the way back to Duke!

They took xrays and saw the blockage. The doctor said, "It's worse than an ileus."

Oh, STOP!

So they give him morphine for his pain, and install a stomach pump down his nose to attempt to suction the contents of his stomach and small intestines out of his nose.

OF COURSE, THIS IS ALL A DREAM, RIGHT?

THEN they announce that something has gone wrong with his kidneys and they are malfunctioning, have dropped a lot since that same morning (I guess that was today, THIS morning--seems like a week ago!).

So he is either staying at Watauga and if the nose tube resolves it, then he can come home at some point, but the doctor said they don't want to start on a complicated case like his when they don't even have his records, so they'd prefer to send him back to Duke, but I am not allowed to drive him.

So at this moment, I am home, completely exhausted. Bill's daughter Emma gets here tomorrow (planned long ago, and excellently timed, as it turns out!) and on Saturday, I guess she and I will go back to Duke if he is there.

The blessing would be that he doesn't have to go back, and he gets fixed in Boone, and can just come home.

I have all the phones in the house beside my bed, and will post again tomorrow when I know what is going on.

Wow.

Unreal.

And did I mention that this is unreal?