Good News, Thanks To All Of You

First off, and most importantly: the hospital released Tom on Friday evening and he's home now. He'll be weak for a while yet, but he's already much further along the road to recovery than I thought that he'd be just a couple of days ago.

But the point of this: thank you all very much for the wonderful outpouring of well-wishes, both publicly in our comments and privately via email.

(Okay, the person who wished Tom well in his iChat status message was a little disconcerting, but thank you, too.)

I'm focusing more on helping Tom with his recovery process and won't be able to send you each a personal thank you note — but I believe that all your love and support really made a differerence. Tom spent some time after we got home tonight reading all the comments from my previous posts, and he says he feels really touched and humbled to know that he has such friends in the world.

Thank you, all of you, again, from both of us.

Wednesday's Tom Status

(If I use the day of the week, this can't last longer than a week, right?)

When we last left Tom, he was in the ICU and about to leave there for the general ward. Here's some more detail, as many of you have asked.

Last week, Tom was having trouble with a kidney stone causing him some pain. Let's just say that if you've ever had one, you'll know what I mean by "some pain." He got an appointment to see his doctor on on Monday the 13^th to get it taken care of, and that was that — we thought.

That kidney stone → kidney infection → septic shock. That was what got him into the ICU on Friday and kept him there through Monday. Monday evening he was transferred to the general ward.

Somewhere in there (Sunday?) he had one of those "this can't be good" experiences — I'll just say that you never really want to hear a gastroenterologist say, "Well, you're an interesting case!"

That septic shock caused low enough blood pressure that, based on some of his other symptoms, they started worrying about things like ischemic colitis. So, this morning he got a colonoscopy, with the results (so far) being that he's in the clear (whew!). And so long as he couldn't eat, they threw in a gallbladder (HIDA) scan. We're still waiting for the real test results on that one.

I think that he's also been tested for jaundice, anemia, and diabetes — and those are just he ones that I can recall. Given the amount of punishment his body has taken over the last five decades, the doctors there seem to think that he's a walking and talking lab dummy to show to students. That sounds somewhat crass, and I don't mean it that way; it's more that my perception is that some of the doctors are finding him to be a fascinating example of the number of things that can go wrong with a person without actually killing him.

"So, you were born with spina bifida, and because of that you had multiple tendon surgeries on your leg, and somehow that's related to your heart attack, and now you're in here for…"

"Nothing related to any of that at all, actually."

And the reason why I haven't gone into detail about this before could probably be figured out from some of the subtext going on here. Remember that crappy health insurance plan Tom wrote about (see the previous post)? Yeah, that one. So crappy it didn't actually pay for anything, but we still got cancelled last year, effective as of the end of last month. We had to do some very fancy footwork to find another plan (including jumping through five billion hoops) but it appears that we're still covered by insurance. As I found out today. Yeah — throughout this whole mess, we didn't know if we had coverage up until this morning.

My recommendation: try to arrange your life such that you never find yourself running calculations on your way to the emergency room, trying to figure out whether you're going to get to keep your husband or your house. For a while there, I was scared I was going to lose both.

End of story: the docs are currrently telling us that he'll go home, most likely, on Friday. I'll post more when I know more.

Current Tom Status

Tom's still pretty darn sick. He went into the ICU on Friday afternoon, and as of tonight (Sunday), I was told that he'd be there at least through Tuesday. I'm expecting he'll be in the general ward from 1-3 days after that, depending on how things go.

I printed off many of the messages that y'all left here and brought it in to read to him ("hey, Tom, I brought you a 21^st century get well card!"). Thanks, everyone, for your kind thoughts. They've meant a lot to both of us.

And I can't end this without recommending that you read something of his: on January 26, Tom wrote a piece titled Why HSA's suck - for most people:

I can attest that HSA's suck, even if you have a relatively high income, but are not absolutely healthy… It has cost me more money, and I've gotten less health care for that money. It incentivizes me to put off going to the doctor because of the cost, thereby increasing the chance that I'll put off getting early treatment for illness.

Yep, that's exactly it.