Quick, call an ambulance

Damn, go away for a couple weeks and I'm not even sure how to post post a blog on my own website... What the hell happened to the old format?  don't recall seeing anything about this... Guess I can check the Blogger forums later and try to figure out WTF's going on...

Anyway I figured you guys would get a little smile laugh about how I ended up in the hospital.. or more to the point, how I finaly got to the hospital.  The whole thing still seems a little strange... I'll start with a video of an Old American Folk Song..  listen to the words in the first verse.. Some of you are old enough you might remember it from elementary school...

"And died from a toothache in his heel"

I've been thinking about line for the last three or or four weeks, when I was about seven we used to laugh about it.  For me it wasn't a toothache or my heel, just a ingrown toenail, that got infected..  From what I've been told,  it tried to kill me, and it wasn't for lack of medical attention.. On top of that I was a month or so overdue for hair cut and beard trim before I went in to hospital..  if I get any shaggier I'll need a wagon wheel to comb it out..

A month or so ago I noticed I my left toe was swollen and seemed to have an infection..  since I had an appointment with my VA podiatrist coming up in a few weeks I tried to ignore it.. It wouldn't let me, a few days before my VA appointment I gave up and went to the emergency room..  They told me what I thought I already knew..  I had an infection in my toe..  They gave me some antibiotics, pain pills and told me to follow up with the VA... That was on Sunday..  Friday I went to the VA..

The Podiatrist at the VA confirmed I had an infected ingrown toenail, and it didn't seem to be getting any better.  After a painful lesson in why yanking out toenails is a violation of the Geneva Convention, he gave me some more antibiotics and a follow up appointment a week later..  He also said if it didn't get better to either call or go directly to the ER...  By Monday it was worse..  so I called the VA, the nurse told me to go to the ER,,, I did...  Not much sense it repeating the last paragraph, but that's what happened.  More antibiotics and pain pills, then make sure I made my appointment at the VA...

I did..  but when I got to the VA they'd misplaced my appointment, treated me as a walk in and sent me to my primary VA Doctor, who, of course, was badly backed up.  At the time I was pissed.  As it turns out I may have been been lucky..  Remember,  in less than two 10 days my foot had already been looked at by two Emergency Room Doctors and the VA Podiatrist all had said the same thing..  The Physicians Assistant I ended up seeing at the VA took one look and told me she thought I had a big circulation problem and needed to be in the hospital..  Within minutes, my regular VA doctor, and the VA Podiatrist were in the room talking about me losing toes... or maybe my foot!!  They confirmed the diagnosis with a full sonogram..  The only way I was leaving the place would be in an ambulance...  Hell I had to fight with them to get to the outside smoking area for ten minutes.. That was a little after two in the afternoon.. They decided on Wuesthoff in Rockledge Florida..  the same ER I'd visited twice in the last two weeks..

Let me tell about emergency transfers between medical facilities... it wasn't what I expected..

It took almost three hours for the ambulance service to pick me up... the VA had closed by the time I got out of there.  I arrived at the hospital around 6:00 pm.. by ambulance from another medical facility and was sent to the Waiting Room to wait my turn..  Sometime around 7:00 pm I was told they couldn't help me and they had no idea WTF the VA had sent me there..  and they were calling an ambulance to send me to Holmes Regional Hospital..  Beyond that they couldn't do anything more than give me a chest E-Ray so Holmes would have it handy for the emergency amputation I was sure to get when I got to to Holmes..  That and a doctor went completely ballistic when I asked why they hadn't considered a circulation problem during one of my two previous ER visits.  I thought it was a reasonable question.. He Didn't.

The ambulance didn't pick me up until after midnight.....  By around two in the morning Holmes got me into bed, with out cutting off anything, and too damned tired to care if they did.   

That's enough for now.  The story gets better, in a good way, In the last couple weeks I've had more Medical Procedures than I've had in my entire lifetime, the hospital lab has more of my blood than I do,  the toe is still a little ify, but I still have it and it looks like it will stay were it belongs...  

In terms of miles, it took me twelve hours by ambulance to get a total of about twenty-five miles... 

One final thought..  Over the last couple weeks I've gotten hundreds of emails, dozens of phone calls and several visits from my Grumpy friends... Some I've know for years and never talked to directly.  A few people went way out their way to track me down and call from out of state..  That might have as much to do with me still being around, and (I think) mostly intact, as the doctors did.