The H-Man

I played doctor with Howie tonight…

No, he’s not quite ready for that just yet. *Sigh* But I got your attention, didn’t I?

I need to back up a little bit. Howie’s discharge papers from Johns Hopkins said a nurse would come to the (Dea’s) house to remove his staples. Then we were told by the home health company that the visiting physical therapist was going to remove them. We had to postpone the PT visits when Howie was on bedrest last week, and then we ended up leaving Maryland ahead of schedule. The clincher came when the home health department from the local hospital told Howie they didn’t want to open an account for him if they were only sending someone out one time before we left. So what were we supposed to do?

Well, we decided to just eat the co-pay and go to the ER at Frederick Memorial Hospital on Saturday. They got us in pretty quickly. Everyone we encountered there was friendly and it was obviously an efficient ER. It was kind of funny…When the doctor asked how many staples there were, we told him 104 and he kind of rolled his eyes a little and smiled before excusing himself to get another person to assist him. They worked on them together, removing about half of them. The rest, they said, needed 4-5 more days to heal. One of the doctors sent a disposable staple remover home with us, just in case our family doctor didn’t have one.

A few hours later, Howie was feeling chilled to the point he was shivering and his teeth chattered, even with him bundled beneath blankets and trained with a space heater’s glow. He felt hot to the touch and, sure enough, he had a fever. It was 102°, past the 101° limit his discharge papers specified. The acetaminophen he’s been taking with the oxycodone artificially lowered his temp, so he’d not had a fever when we were in the ER that morning.

I called and spoke to the attending physician at Hopkins’ ortho-spine unit, who advised us to head into a doctor’s office or ER since it sounded like Howie had a urinary tract infection (UTI). Howie’s having not one, but two Foley catheters while in the hospital raised his risk for a UTI.

So, back we went to Frederick’s that evening, co-pays be hanged! Once again, they got us in quickly. One employee, probably working a 12-hour shift, recognized us from earlier. Just rent us out a room here, folks. Sure enough, the test strip was “markedly positive”. He’s been on Cipro and taking cranberry supplements since Saturday night and feels much better now.

You already know we’re home, so that brings you up to speed on what happened between Bedrest for Bonzo and our trip home.

So, that brings us back to today, when I played doctor with Howie. He was concerned with part of his incision, so he called Dr. Kebaish’s office and left a message. I took close-up pictures of the remaining stapled areas and e-mailed them to him. When he returned our call this afternoon, he said it looked good and the staples could come out. Howie told him our family doctor was going to remove the rest on Friday, but Dr. Kebaish said they needed to come out before then. When Howie told him we had the tool and that I’d watched the removal of the others, we were given the go ahead for me to do the job.

That handy-dandy skin staple remover works great. There were a few ouchy moments, especially since some were well past due for coming out. But out they are now and everything can heal up without the irritation of foreign objects.

Howie’s still not able to sit up in a chair for long before he is in enough pain he wants to lie down. His back and hips hurt him when he sits for long. He’s tried a couple different upright upholstered chairs of ours plus the recliner, but he can’t sit in any of them for long before he has to lie back down. He did go for a brief walk today, though.

It’s kind of ironic…Before, was okay sitting, but could not walk without pain. Now he can walk without pain, but it hurts to sit. The latter’s bound to get better as he heals. Right now, Dr. Kebaish wants him to take it easy these next few weeks so his bones can heal well. He isn’t to do any PT until after his follow-up appointment on February 9.