Yes, the hospital routine

Zora (and I) are a bit better today. Again, the main problem in the hospital is that she doesn’t sleep well. That’s why it’s better for her to be home.

On the plus side, a posse of good and kind doctors came by to see her. The mysterious tenderness on her hand is strange and not good. But there’s little chance it’s a result of embolism. Still, the doctors prefer to have her there, which makes sense. But it also makes sense that home is a healthier place. She will probably be in there for the weekend.

A surgeon came in—not Dr. Evans, but one of his co-operators—a very pleasant British man of Nigerian decent (I called him out on being Ibo—I said they were the smart ones). It’s interesting, because he mentioned all the things that could go wrong during surgery, but managed to do so in a non-alarmist way. It’s really hard to overstate how important bedside manner is. Now I understand.

Nothing has really changed regarding surgery. It is probably inevitable, but not urgent. This surgeon said that it probably is better to operate before Zora becomes symptomatic, as symptomatic means that the heart will damage itself. He also said that there is probably a 95% chance that unless something else bad happens, the valve can be repaired and not replaced. That is very good news. Given that Zora does not have other problems, the doctor said that such surgery for them is routine. And I believe him. Dr. Evans is gone till Friday. And this surgeon will be gone between Christmas and New Years (they work together). So unless something changes, and we want to go ahead with surgery, nothing should happen in the next month.

The hope now is that this hand pain (Zora did manage some tylenol with codeine for pain) is just some weird fluke that will go away and never be heard from again. It does baffle all the best doctors. Bad case would be some infection that isn’t responding to these massive doses of antibiotics. The important thing remains to be to get rid of the endocarditis.

Zora also went off of the “bad” antibiotic, gentamicin (2 days before originally planned). This drug really seems to give most doctors the heebie-jeebies. Taking it, there is the risk of kidney damage. I’m hoping that now that she’s off it without problems, there is no further risk of kidney damage. And if it helped get rid of the bug, then all the better. Zora remains on other, more benign antibiotics.

Meanwhile Zora’s mom comes in late tomorrow. I hope she brought her walking shoes. The hospital is 5 miles away. There’s really no good way to get to Manhattan other than biking. And I got extra bikes. But I don’t know if she’s up for that. Perhaps she can find a place to stay in Manhattan. Cabs don’t seem hard to get.

There’s a kind of street-festival atmosphere crossing the bridges. I got to ride on the other (South) side of the Queensboro Bridge. A nice new view and there’s no ugly fence there (and they’ve just put up a nasty chain-link fence on the bike-path side for no good reason other than to ruin the view). It’s just annoying that pedestrians have no respect at all for the bike lane. But the only real problems are around the bridges. Once you get the Manhattan streets, there’s less traffic than normal.

It’s also interesting that if you enter the hospital from Madison Ave., it seems like the ghetto hospital, with public housing across the street. But if you enter from 5th Avenue, it looks like the Upper East Side, with Central Park across the street. I like to enter from 5th Avenue.

Zora’s roommate sounds like very elderly woman. On the plus side, she’s not loud. On the minus side, she wet her bed tonight. Too bad Zora doesn’t have the window-side bed. But Zora’s room is away from the nurses’ station. And there’s a little more space between her bed and the hall. So it’s a bit quieter than that other damn hospital. And even other room on the same floor.

Dinner tonight was provided by Karine. Nice miso soup from a great little Japanese place we ate at not too long ago. I didn’t bring my camera, as there isn’t really anything new. But tomorrow I’ll try to bring it. If nothing else than to get a picture of all the people walking across the bridge.

Also, if you call Zora, please call her on her cell phone rather than reaching her through the hospital switchboard and her room phone. If you call the room phone, it rings (loudly), perhaps waking her up, and she has to answer it. If you call her cell phone, it rings (softly), and she can sleep through it or choose to not answer it. The poor girl needs her rest.

Fact for the day: did you know that endocarditis was first described (in English) in Baltimore? “The Canadian physician responsible for the laying the foundation of modern medical education, emphasising the importance of clinical experience, and the first professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University Medical School in Baltimore, Sir William Osler, presented the first English description of endocarditis in 1885” (source: http://www.patient.co.uk/showdoc/40000580).