31 August 2024
I hate to let the month go without an update but it's been an unusual month.
For the first time, Joyce had to cancel her appointment with Dr. Tong. But it wasn't her fault.
On Aug. 12 I managed to hit my head on the kitchen floor. The concussion knocked me out "for 10 minutes," Joyce later told me. She couldn't rouse me but helped me get up when I came to.
I have no memory of this. One minute I was washing a Pyrex dish in the sink and putting it in the dish rack. They next minute I was lying on the couch annoyed about the situation.
Did I black out? Did I slip and fall? No idea.
I woke up the next morning with double vision, a headache and pain in my right leg and hip. After 10 days of that without improvement I emailed my doctor. She called to urge me to go the ER for a head scan.
Easier said than done. But a friend drove me over and stayed almost the entire night as I had an EKG, chest X-ray, CT scan and MRI. The scans showed something on top of my brain that at first appeared to be a tumor but was subsequently ruled blood by the replay crew in New York.
So no treatment. But the ER doctor wanted to admit me for observation. Unfortunately I had to do Joyce's dressing change in a few hours and the next day as well, so I signed a release form and my friend drove me home at 3 a.m.
After I did the dressing changes and arranged for the home nurse (who had been on jury duty) to do them over the weekend, I returned to the ER with my friend. But I stayed and he went home.
I spent the day and late into the night there with my heart on a monitor before a room was available in the hospital. I spent the next day doing tests before I was released before dinner, taking a cab home.
My brother Dan happened to be around on Aug. 16 when Joyce had an appointment with Jennifer the RN at the wound clinic, so she didn't miss that. But her appointment with Dr. Tong on Aug. 23 after my first visit to the ER was something she just couldn't get to by herself after I returned to the ER.
Meanwhile she had an orientation session via Zoom for the memory clinic but that was a bust. The link was sent to her personal email not her Kaiser email, which just had a reminder that when clicked on just kept cycling back from the appointment to her email. We had to call tech support to find out how to access the Zoom session and by the time we did, it was over.
So that's in limbo.
Unexplained loss of consciousness requires the doctor to report it to the DMV so I won't be driving again until November even if my vision improves. I did manage to take the bus to Kaiser yesterday and think I can get Joyce there and back for visits to Dr. Tong and Jennifer this month.
But neither of us is doing particularly well as August ends.