Health Issues

In a way, this issue is kind of hard to write about.  I have tried several times.  It comes out sounding like clinical play-by-play of everything that happened to me - a medical log, as it were.  I think I am going to skip that and write what it did to me.  And that is the hard part.

But once I get that out, then I can start writing about other things.  But I have to say it, because it has been such an important part of my experience - on my life, on my esteem, on my marriages.

The short version - I had to leave the fair circuit early and fly home from Montana in August.  The intense lifestyle of a carnie was not good on my foot - again.  When I started the season, my foot was healed.  By the time I left, the diabetic ulcer on the pad of my foot had ripped open again and was soaking through my bandages, through my socks and filling my shoe with blood on a nightly basis.  I didn't want to risk serious infection, so I bit back my machismo, admitted that I couldn't hack it and took a flight from Missoula back to Phoenix.

The doctors tried everything to heal it.  They tried to trim back the thick callus with a scalpel, as this was what was preventing the hole in my foot from closing up.  It worked once.  It didn't work this time.  They put me under and sutured it up.  When they removed the stitches, they didn't take.  My foot was filleted open like a brown trout.  They sent me home that way.

Two weeks later, my foot ballooned up with infection - infection that went all the way to the bone.  They rushed me into surgery, opened up my foot again, irrigated out the infection, and chipped away the rotted pieces of bone.

They installed a beautiful piece of equipment called a wound vac.  Essentially, this is a piece of sponge shoved in my wound and sealed airtight with a plastic bandage.  A hose emerges from the bandage to a little vacuum that sucks moisture out of the wound providing the proper environment to allow tissue to knit at a much fast rate.

And since I had infection in the bone, they installed a PICC line (permanent IV site) on my upper right arm, and every four hours they fed me the most vile antibiotic fluid called vancomycin.  Vanco is toxic - literally.  It burns out your veins, and if you are not careful it will burn out your kidneys, too.  I don't know what it is like to go through chemo, but I imagine vanco is a little like it.  It makes you exhausted, dizzy, moody, nauseous, etc.

I spent a week in the hospital, and they discharged me on Thanksgiving evening.  I went home to have Thanksgiving dinner with my family, got hooked up to my IV and threw up all of of my dinner.

They put me on Home Health, which meant that a nurse would come to my house every other day to check on me.  They would take my vitals, change the bandages on my foot and my PICC line.  They helped alot.  But it was actually Temple that did most of the work.

Temple cleaned out our spare bedroom and got it ready for me.  It was closer to the bathroom, so I wouldn't have to walk so far on crutches.  She was the one who changed out my IVs.  I had to have someone connect my IV every 8 hours.  She would connect me, and I would experience three hours of nausea and dizziness while the fluids went into me.  Then she would have to disconnect me.

She was driving home from her job on her lunch break to connect my IV.  She was racing home to disconnect me.

You might ask - a man with two wives, why is he placing all of the burden on one wife?  That's a good question.  I have asked that myself.  But at the beginning, Temple insisted that she was going to be the one to change out my IV.  She is extremely efficient, and she has had medical training.  She eventually grew to detest this duty.  I shouldn't have let it happen.

Temple was there for me to do all of the physical care, but she was especially there for all of the emotional support.  Allow me to explain.

One month, I am working.  The next month, I am not working.  I have been in situations before where I have been out of work.  But now, I can't even walk.  I am confined to a bedroom that becomes a prison.  I am chained to the wall with an IV tube.  I can hear the laughter and carrying-on of my family outside of the door, but I can't join them.  I am feeling sick.  But most of the day, I am alone.  Everyone goes about their duties.  Temple goes to work.  Martha has her errands.  I am at home.  Alone.  With my dark thoughts.

Later, Temple said that something about this sickness changed me.  Something about being hooked to the IVs.  I think that she is right.  I became very insecure.  I became jealous of Temple's time at work and her co-workers.  I could see what a burden it was on her to run back and forth, taking care of me.  Work was a place that became enjoyable for her, and home life became stressful - coming home to a moody, surly husband.

I can see now how hard it was on her.  But then all I could think about was myself.  For the first time in my life, I experienced depression.  Oh yes, I have had the occasional bout of melancholy.  But I had never experienced depression until now.  I would watch Temple get into the car to go to work, watch the car back down the driveway and head down the dirt road, leaving me alone.  Then I would  burst into uncontrollable fits of crying.  I had also never experienced any kind of marital strife until this moment.  Before this, I had been a big, dumb, happy-go-lucky man who stumbled through life, always able to take care of his family, always taking for granted what wonderful wives he had.  But then I pushed them away to the point where I actually realized that I could lose them.  And nothing was ever the same after that.

A couple of weeks after being home, I started to develop a terrible rash.  The doctor wanted to prolong going off of the antibiotic until I could get full benefit from it.  Finally, I was beet red all over, and my whole body was swollen.  They took me off of the vanco, and they pulled the PICC line out of my arm.

For the next several weeks, I peeled.  At first, it was like a sunburn peeling.  Then I was pulling skin off of my body in sheets.

But the wound vac worked.  My wound had sealed up, and all that remained of the gaping hole in my foot was the smallest of slits.  The Home Health nurses stopped coming, and I started my life in recovery.

Several days after they pulled the PICC line out of my arm, I woke up one morning to find my entire left arm purple, swollen and cold to the touch.  Tears came to my eyes.  I knew from experience what this was. This was a blood clot caused by the PICC line, an upper extremity DVT.  I went into the doctor, and there was basically nothing they could do about it but keep me on blood thinners.

On Christmas Eve, I went to the store to do some last minute shopping for the wives.  The pain in my arm and chest was so intense that I literally thought I was going to die.  It took all of my focus to get my shopping done and go out to the car.  The next day, Christmas, I woke up in the afternoon from a nap, and the pain was so intense that I sat on the couch and cried.  (Yes, I did alot of crying in this time perdiod.)

The pain gradually became bearable as the blood found ways to get through my arm.  My doctor said that I will likely  have this DVT all of my life, and that, as long as it doesn't affect the quality of my life, I should be fine.  The foot also was fine.  I was able to walk again.

But the dark moods, the depression, the feelings of worthlessness, the fighting with my wife - none of that abated.  That continued for months and months.

At the end of January, I was alarmed to see the ulcer begin to open up again on the bottom of my foot.  The doctor kept an eye on it, but then he moved and I was left without care.  I began treating my wound every day the way I used to before any of the surgeries.  But at the beginning of this month, I started to get a fever.  I noticed that my foot was swelling again, so I went to the ER.  My foot was infected again.  They X-rayed it; the infection had not reached the bone, but they put me on antibiotics.  The swelling went down while I was on the antibiotics.

But two days after I went off of the meds, the swelling returned.  I went to see my new doctor, and he was very concerned the moment he saw my foot.  This was last Friday.  He wanted to put me in for surgery later that afternoon.  He looked at my second toe.  The infection was very red and angry around that toe, and he told me that he was probably going to have to take off that toe.

I went home to get my things together.  There were a couple of hours until the procedure.  I stared at my toe.  Probably, I would wake up without it.  It didn't seem fair.  But I had to laugh at the whole situation.  I got into my wife's drawer and found some pink nail polish.  I pained the toenail pink.  If they were going to cut off my toe, they were going to have a chuckle at finding that toenail painted pink.  It was my way of coping.

I went in for surgery.  They lay me on the operating table and administered the anesthesia.  As I went under, I felt a hot wind blowing over my body as if blowing something away.

I found myself standing beneath blue skies.  There was a beautiful desert landscape surrounding me, complete with red rocks.  My wife Temple was standing with me.

Then I woke up to the OR nurse telling me, "We're done."

I had never dreamed while under anesthesia before.

The good news was - I kept my toe.  My foot was very infected.  But none of it had reached the bone.  I was in such good spirits.  I stayed at the hospital for a few days, and, as I write this, I am at home, off of my feet, wearing another wound vac.  A Home Health nurse just left my house just a few minutes ago.

But the strange thing about this is - my depression is gone.  I have been positive and in better spirits since then.  Some may mark this off as coincidence, but I don't think so.

This dark chapter of my life started with anesthesia, going into surgery.  And it ended with another episode of anesthesia.  It was like I lost something when I went under that time, and gained it back when I came out of it.  It may seem crazy.  But I really think that there is something to it.

I don't know what the future will hold.  If you logically examine the process of diabetes, then my prognosis for the future doesn't look good.  But that doesn't matter.  I lived my life in darkness for a few months.  I refuse to do it again.  I will be happy no matter what.  I will be positive, no matter the outcome.  And I will love my wives no matter what they think of me.  Both of them helped me tremendously.  I thank them for that.

But it was Temple who sacrificed so much to take care of me.  It was Temple who bore the brunt of my depression and shed many tears because of cruel things I said.

I just can't help but remember my dream - red rocks in the desert, and Temple standing before me, the wind blowing in her hair...