Old Age Just Isn’t Any Fun

I don’t want to write this blog, I really don’t. I’m afraid I’ll sound like a whiner and complainer, which I’m not. All I’m doing is just reporting what has recently happened to me.

Starting in early February and going through early May, I have been hospitalized three times, each stay was for over a week, and it’s not yet clear that the original problem has been completely solved, or that the follow-on problems that were discovered along the way have been fixed.

Numerous bouts of Sepsis over the last ten or eleven years have taught me that a little patience and massive amounts of intravenous antibiotics fed through a PICC line would bring life back to normal. But that was before I turned 80 . . . or had a stroke.

So, when the big, scabby thing on the outside of my right ankle was diagnosed as a cellulitis, the root cause of almost all sepsis infections, I didn’t worry . . . but I should have when my doctor added, “My, that’s really ulcerated,” and sent me to the hospital.

The doctor put in charge of my care was a podiatrist who was clearly out of his depth, but the hospitalist on my case listened to me when I related my experiences and called in an infectious disease doctor. They agreed that the open sore should be treated at the wound care center when I was discharged, which sounded reasonable enough.

Reasonable, but totally inadequate when you consider that the head wound care doc, said podiatrist, was going on vacation for three weeks in the midst of all this, leaving the open sore on my ankle to the care of random visiting nurses. The predictable result was infection of the entire lower leg . . . so, I went back to the hospital.

This time I sent the podiatrist packing as I had found out that the head of the Infectious Disease department, who had taken care of me many times before, had returned from an extended vacation, had heard about my most recent predicament, and was ready to get to work.

I was there for about a week during which kidney problems appeared. Turns out the kidneys had become too dry, a side effect of using diuretics to keep my lungs dry, the best treatment for congestive heart failure. So, I was sent to the hospital’s infusion center, where they loaded me up with one liter of saline solution to make the kidneys wet.

I don’t know who authorized the orders but there had clearly been a mistake which manifested itself in a massive congestive heart failure attack the next day. So, I was back in the hospital yet again!

This time, in addition to intravenous antibiotics, the heart failure made it impossible for my system to pull enough oxygen out of the air, so now I have to go around with one of those things, called cannula, stuck in my nose.

There is the problem of the 25-foot hose that delivers oxygen to my nose, but I have partially solved the problem by buying a battery-powered unit that fits nicely in my rollator.

Then there is the problem of antibiotic-induced diarrhea, but I won’t go into that . . . too messy . . .

The doctors aren’t at fault here. When the patient is 80 years old, has had a stroke, has congestive heart failure, atrial fibrillation, hypertension, decreased kidney function, poly-neuropathy, not to mention the as-yet undetected maladies of the body, anything goes . . . or doesn’t.

Why? The cure for any malady can be a curse for another, making one or the other, and perhaps a third incurable. Which means some things you’ve just got to live with.

Oh well, it beats the alternative!