So...

So….I’m not in Connecticut :~( and this is the reason why:   

I had loaded up the secret project on Monday and was going great guns getting the quilting done.  My friend Pat came over in the morning and told me I was talking funny.  I knew my face felt like I had had a couple of shots of Novocain and that they were wearing off.  Michael came home from golf a short time later and told me the same thing.  We did  bunch of the tests that you do to see if you are having a stroke, and I finally ended up going to the emergency room (on the advice of 2 doctors I called).  They ended up admitting me…which immediately meant that there was no way I could make the 7:30 AM flight to Connecticut I had booked for Tuesday morning.   After all of the tests, the diagnosis came out to what I thought was going on, on Monday…an atypical case of Bell’s Palsy.  One of the top 4 symptoms is having your taste buds affected…and you know I’ve been complaining about that for 2 weeks.  I also have the facial drooping and pain my ears.  A Bell’s Palsy diagnosis is more one of those “process of elimination” viruses, rather than something you can actively test for…..so it takes a long time to tell what’s going on.  All things considered this was a good diagnosis…it could have been much worse.  I was home Tuesday afternoon, and based on the doctor’s answers to my questions (am I contagious? NO.  Am I precluded from doing anything?  NO), I went water walking in the pool with Pat at 2 PM.  I took a long nap when I got home because as Michael found out with his pacemaker, they do NOT let you sleep in the hospital.  I was awakened every 1-1/2 hours for “vitals” and/or blood work.  They also came in twice asking “ok, are you dead in here” because I had turned over and accidentally ripped the heart monitors from my chest.  There was one (funny to me) incident in the morning before I was released.  First, you have to know that they are now giving a shot of heparin as kind of the standard thing in the hospital to thin your blood and help prevent blood clots (maybe it’s only on the stroke floor, I never got a definitive answer to that question).  Trust me…it makes your blood like water…amost no clotting what-so-ever.  Also, once they decide they are admitting you, they insert an IV port in your arm to make it easier to give you any kind of meds you need.  (Spoiler alert….if you have a weak stomach, you may want to skip to the end of the blog).  Anyway, I was reading my book in the morning, waiting to be released and I noticed the port they had put in for an IV was bleeding/leaking.  I really didn’t want to get blood all over the bed, so I called the nurse to ask if that could be removed (since I already knew I was being released) and she sent someone in.  They took out the port and put a piece of gauze over the wound and then some tape.  She started to clean up and I went back to reading my book.  I suddenly felt something run down my arm…and oh my…there was blood everywhere.  I told the nurse we had a slight problem and she walked over from the waste can where she had been throwing stuff away…she looked at my arm…and looked up at me in alarm!!!  I said “don’t worry, I’m not going to faint or anything…blood doesn’t bother me”.  Good thing because as she ripped off the tape and the gauze the blood was literally spurting out.  She ran and got a pressure bandage and wrapped it around about 20 times and almost cut off the circulation to my hand.  There was blood everywhere…luckily I hadn’t changed into my street clothes yet, so I got cleaned up and she stripped the bloody bedding and I stripped out of my blood soaked gown and got dressed and all was well.  Everything was calm by the time Michael arrived to take me home.  Michael had already been invited to Larry & Evelyn’s house for dinner, and then the regular Tuesday night movies afterwards…so he went while I stayed home and rested and basically got nothing done.  Oh….I did get my suitcase unpacked, which was easy because by Monday afternoon when I left for the hospital, I had only packed the essentials, my tea cup filled with my Lipton tea bags and Truvia packets to get my through the week, and the jelly rolls I was going to work on while there: