My Hospital Stay

I missed LibertyCon

Some of you may have noticed that I wasn’t at LibertyCon this year.

And that’s the good news.

I don’t think it would have been very helpful had I been in Chattanooga when I needed to go into the hospital.

Yeah, my June was very eventful.

See, I had two things happen. I’m not entirely certain which happened first.

While LibertyCon was ongoing, I wasn’t feeling great. I felt easily fatigued. I was coughing a lot. I wasn’t eating much. I was urinating every two hours, no matter how many fluids I had actually consumed.

After a week and a half of that, my family had decided to call an ambulance.

The EMTs didn’t like my blood sugar… or my blood pressure… or how I was breathing.

So, that Saturday night, I went for a ride on an ambulance. I spent a lot of time asleep, because I was so tired.

Apparently, my electrolytes were … gone. While my blood sugar hadn’t gone too far into the moon, my electrolytes weren’t there anymore. You know how some people have issues with potassium? Well, in my case, I had no potassium. At all.

I had gone into a form of ketoacidosis.

On top of that, I had legionella pneumonia. No, don’t ask me how I caught that. I don’t know, nor does anyone else.

Of course, they ran some IV lines.

So I spent from Saturday night until Wednesday in the hospital. I don’t remember much of Sunday. Or Monday.

I got some reading in. So, yay?

I got a lot of tests run. Every four hours. Whether I was awake or not, they were poking me for blood draws or wrapping my elbow joint in a blood pressure cuff. And yes, I mean they put the cuff on the joint. It sucked.

The ER beds were nice. The ICU bed was as well. But the regular hospital bed screwed up my back; because I’m over 40, and sleeping the wrong way overnight will wreck me.

I’ll admit, their hospital food was awesome. It was really tasty. To the point where I asked if they made their own soup (they did). I was hoping I could buy it at home.

By Tuesday, I was mostly functional. It took all of Wednesday to get me out of there, because hospital paperwork seems to be worse than police or military paperwork. I literally once received a prisoner into my custody faster than I was sprung from the hospital (three hours versus six).

So… Good news: I dropped 20 pounds. Yay?

Bad news: I got the hospital bill… Yeah.

If you’re been putting off buying a novel, consider now being a good time to invest.