Salad Hands

We recently got together with Greg and Melissa and gave me a father's day gift. I am the salad chef in our house. He gave me a set of "salad hands" and some fresh vegetables from his garden.

Here's a picture of me using the salad hands with some of Greg's vegetables in the foreground. Yummy!

Turning a new leaf

I've erratically posted notes about the intracerebral hemmorhage that occurred on Jan 3, 2009. I thought I wanted to do it to help me track my recovery progress and let others know about the experience. I realized recently that this is actually kind of dark and depressing to document the troubles I have been through and the residuals I still feel.

Enough!

I've got the rest of my life to live and I'm not going to waste another minute dwelling on this negative stuff. I'm going to write about current and hopefully happy and joyous events in my life.

I prefer this means of producing thoughtful writing to venues like facebook or twitter or email.

Jan 6, 2009 - ICH follow-up - first full day at home

I am going back to document my experience following an intracerebral hemorrhage on January 3, 2009. I want to do this so I can remember the progress I have made.

On this day and many days following, it seemed like I slept all the time. My lay view is that a lot of energy is burned trying to remap in the brain for brain cells that have been killed.

My right hand and arm are completely numb. The right side of my face and scalp are completely numb. My right toes are numb.

I am unable to manipulate the touch pad on my PC. I decide to get an external optical mouse to see if that will help.

I burn the inside of my mouth drinking coffee. Apparently I am a "right side chewer" and things go into the right side of my mouth first. I cannot feel hot coffee and it burns when it swishes to the left side.

All food seems to have no taste.

Yikes! When I am sitting at the table, I discover that I am drooling as a little wet spot forms on the table.

I think to myself - I just need to rest and everything will come out ok. I should be back to work in a couple of weeks.

My first grocery shopping trip by bicycle

I've had this idea of grocery shopping on a bicycle for months. First I had to a get a suitable sturdy bicycle that nobody wanted to steal. I bought one on Craigs list for $20 and spent a lot of sweat equity and some money fixing it up to be a commuter. Then I decided I wanted to rig it so I could drop our paper recycling waste basket on it and ride to the recycle station. Nobody made a pannier (bicycle saddle bag) big enough. So I decided to build one out of wood, using the ample stock of wood I got from a sailboard packing crate a few years ago. The box I built is shown on the left.

For the bicycle commuters out there, it has a 1900 cubic inch capacity. I have not seen a commercial pannier anywhere that big. Because I custom built it, I could make it fit my bike exactly while clearing my pedaling feet. Commercial panniers are a compromise because they have to have a universal fit.

So here is my bike just back from the grocery store!

I am especially proud of the 12 pack of diet coke on the rack. It was a little dicey swinging my leg over the bike to get started, but once I was rolling, it rode really well. I felt so good not burning any gas to make this trip. Oh, I forgot to mention, I stopped at Lowe's first to return some unused hardware and buy some other stuff on the same trip.











Look at all the stuff I got on my grocery shopping trip. While I was loading the bike, a man came up and introduced himself. He was the security guard that rode around the grocery store parking lot. He said it looked like my pannier holds a lot of stuff. He wanted to know where I bought it. I told him I made it and his eyebrows raised. He asked me if I would consider making one for sale. I took his email address and told him I might consider it. I am going to make a second pannier for the right side of the bike and might make another one for this guy. Building more of these should go a lot faster since I worked out all the design and kinks on the first one. I'm also going to put lots of red reflective tape on the panniers to make it easier to see me.

The rest of the story of ICH will come

I guess I sort of stopped writing about it. This is one of the things I suffer as a result. I cannot seem to stay on task on anything for very long and it takes me a long time to get something finished. I still have some memories I want to document, if for no other reason to come back in a year and see where I stand on recovery.

more later....

Jan 5, 2009 - More tests and going home

My level of frustration and aggravation was going up. When I went to the bathroom, I had to unplug the control unit on the IV, untangle all the tubes and cords and roll the IV stand along with me. It was a real challenge to pee with all of this mess tagging along.

The speech therapist showed up and did a pretty thorough evaluation. She wanted me to do all kinds of movement with my tongue against a tongue depressor. Then she had me repeat all kinds of funny phrases. I cannot remember any of them but "Peter Piper picked..." was not one of them. Hallelujah, she declared I could eat without choking! This meant they could remove my IV, which was my sole source of liquids and nutrition up to now.

Monday morning is a busy time as the full shift comes on duty. It seemed like it was hard to get anyone's attention to remove my IV. So I just waited in bed.

Matt Soper and James Ford, minister and elder from our church, stopped by to visit me. It was really good to see them. As they were leaving, Matt prayed for me. Then Anne asked them to stop by and see my roommate, a 28 year old man who was having complications with diabetes. I heard Matt talking to him and offering to pray for him. He responded "Please do, I LOVE prayer." This hit me that we had been in the same room with this guy for two days and did not know. I will remember to be more bold in the future.

Dr. Chiu had taken on my case as the neurologist in charge. I saw him over the weekend and he was very nice guy who seemed like he knew what he was doing. One of his associates came by to see me today. I asked him about getting back to cycling. His response was "exercise is good for you. Yes, you can do cycling when you feel like it." Anne blurted in "Wait a minute, you do not know my husband. He's crazy! He rides 50 miles and fast on a bicycle." The doctor responded "Oh, no I did not mean you could do that. You need to take it easy". I think I smiled on the outside, but inside I felt crushed. I did not want to live the rest of my life feeling like a semi-invalid. He did have some good news for me. He said they would release me to go home today. This sounded great.

The nurses came in and told me I was scheduled to get some more tests. I protested and said I had done all the tests the night before. They insisted the doctor had ordered the testing. So I was still hooked to my IV, had not eaten and had to do some tests.

We had brought my PC to the hospital and I had managed to get it connected to the patient network and read email. I wrote a little. Between the IV tubes, the bed and my malfunctioning right hand, it was a no-go. I think I finally set it aside. It had become very apparent that this hemorrhage had really affected my right hand. I could not control the touchpad well. My pinky and ring finger did not have any fine movement control.

Well the testing turned out to be real. They wanted to run some kind of ultrasound tests to examine my carotid arteries. The tech that ran the tests talked to me a lot about what he was doing. He also told me I was very lucky to have Dr. Chiu. He said he was very well read and one of the top stroke doctors in the country. I also learned that Dr. Chiu was the director of the stroke center at the hospital. This was all very reassuring. The tech told me that both my arteries were in great shape and there were no problems there.

After returning to my room, I decided to make some noise. I went by the nurse station and asked them when I was going to get the IV disconnected. One of the nurses got up and said she would take care of it. She followed me back to my room and took it out. Hooray! I'm free!

I figured out the hospital food system. They had this marvelous new concept - order food when you want it and they deliver in 30 minutes. Well, it actually took almost an hour, but I finally got some real food. I was only allowed the low salt menu. Bleah! But it was food. It had virtually no taste. I realized much later that most of the lack of taste was because the hemorrhage had wiped my ability to taste on the right side of my mouth and I could not sense temperatures either.

It was now about 4 in the afternoon and I was ready to get out. We signed all the papers and got my care instructions. I was now supposed to wait for someone to come get me with a wheelchair. Anne went down to get the car. I finally called her and told her I was busting out. She was all for it. I sneaked down the hallway and took the staff elevator to the floor where Anne was waiting. It was wonderful to slide into the seat of a civilian vehicle. I called the nurses station and told them not to bother with transportation - "Bob has left the building."

Jan 4, 2009 - second day in the hospital

During my first night at the hospital, they regularly checked my vital signs and made sure I was not showing any bad neurological signs. The night duty nurse became alarmed when my pulse dropped to 45. I wanted to say that was normal, considering my cardiovascular conditioning. It seemed to me if my pulse rate was 55 during the day, it could slow down when I was sleeping. Eventually a doctor told her it was ok.

On Sunday morning, two ladies came to see me and introduced themselves as physical and occupational therapists. They wanted to evaluate me to determine if I needed to start any kind of therapy. After doing all kinds of little tests, they said they wanted to watch me walk. We began walking down the hallway with one on either side. Without warning one of the ladies would swing her hip over and bump into me. They did this twice. I did not fall over so they decided I must be doing ok for now. It’s not like I was having major functional impairment. By this time I knew I had some numbness in my right hand, but I wasn’t doing any kind of critical assessment. I was just tired and wanted to sleep. The IV stand and tubes were annoying as well. It was difficult to get comfortable.

I hoped to get evaluated by the speech therapist so I could get released to eat something. Such was not the case. It did not matter a whole lot. I was not that hungry. The other big event for Sunday was a lot of MRI testing, with and without dye. I guess they were backed up. I did not get in for that testing until about 7p.m. It seemed like it took a long time. I ended up falling asleep in the MRI machine while they were running the tests. Some people get claustrophobic in these machines. I just get bored.

I was hearing that I might get released the next day. It seemed to me that my condition was stable but I would never heal sitting in the hospital. So I went to bed, exhausted and ready to see the next day.