It was Friday afternoon at 3:30pm on erev erev Christmas (the afternoon before Christmas eve) and all was quiet at Chez Evid. That is, until I vented my G tube (my G tube goes into my stomach and I can open the tube and vent air and drain my stomach contents–it makes me feel better) and not only was there an unusually large amount of fluid, but it was filled with bright red droplets. I had never seen anything like that before.
Following the instructions of the GI who inserted my tube, I called his office. His nurse practitioner said that it sounded like and active bleed and that I needed to go to the ER. She also texted the doctor. He called back while I was on the phone with her and he said the same thing. So off we went to the ER in Manhattan where my doctor was on call. Enroute, a member of my doctor’s team called, asked some more questions and said that he would be tracking my situation at the ER.
The hospital is located on the upper east side of Manhattan and our first interaction was deceptively calm. They brought me in right away, drew some blood for a bunch of blood tests and sent me to the part of the ER that looked much more like an urban ER.
The beds were 2 deep, and like any parking lot, there was constant shifting as people went off for tests or were discharged. It was a bitterly cold night and some people were clearly there to stay warm, but they weren’t given beds. It was a chaotic and cacophonous room and I thought it best to just kinda lay low.
Courtesy of the patient portal, I was able to tell when my test results came back, which was great because they weren’t being particularly generous with information. But there wasn’t much to tell. My original tests showed a healthy level of hemoglobin, so all they could do was wait 4 hours to test me again.
Everything I had heard about feeding tubes and ER docs is true. The ER doc struggled to understand that I have a G-J tube (stomach and intestine) and not just a G tube (stomach only). When he finally grokked it he said that they don’t deal with G-J tubes and refused to make eye contact with me for the remainder of his shift.
Fortunately, unbeknownst to us, my doctor’s office was monitoring the situation. At 9:30 pm they did another blood draw and my hemoglobin had dropped. The decision was to wait 6 hours to do another blood draw, which would be 3:30am.
David was exhausted and we thought at least one of us should be compos mentis, so David went home to catch some sleep and remind the cats that we love them (ok, he really just went to get some sleep, I was the one who wanted him to remind the cats that we love them). I was able to get a back row slot so I was not constantly juggled to make room for others.
I had not fed since Friday around noon and I was already on reduced calories. We had been asking if I could set up a feed and they had been telling us to hold off. But the PA said that I could hook up a feed. Fortunately, I had thought to being my noise cancelling headphones and settled in to listen to episodes of Firefly. My ultimate comfort show.
At some point someone came by to take my vitals and apparently my blood pressure was unusually low, although no one told me that at the time. At 3:35 they did the next blood draw and I settled back down to wait. At about 5am, the PA asked me to vent again and there was only rusty colored stuff. No bright red blood. Then they took my blood pressure again.
Then, out of the blue I get handed my discharge papers. That was also when I found out that I had been ordered to be admitted and had just been waiting for a bed. But because everything looked ok, they cancelled that order and decided to release me with instructions to follow up with my GI’s office early next week. I hightailed it out of there, not even waiting for David to come pick me up. I took a Lyft home before they could change their minds.
We were all really happy to have me home. Dancer snubbed me at first, but both he and Xena Malka magically appeared the minute I crawled into bed. There really is no place like home.