Hospital Part 2

The hospital this time actually admitted James pretty quickly and he was on the Telemetry ward by 10:00 PM. That was nice because I got to go home and get some sleep. I needed it because that night started the hardest 2 weeks of my life.
The telemetry ward is a step-down from ICU. It also meant he was on a constant heart monitor. The first room we were in was a shared room and he was by the window. Our doctor was a young woman who was a general rotating doctor. We will call her Dr. Y. Dr. Y seemed to be a relatively young doctor. It seemed to me that she was maybe even still a resident, but I cannot say that for sure. Here is what I can say, though, James was definitely her first PKD patient. I know that because I had to tell her about his disease.
Just because he got admitted did not mean he was getting better. In fact, he was getting worse. The internist I have discussed before, started James on some antibiotics. It was a broad range antibiotic because he thought that CIPRO wasn't going to work. This turned out to be a horrible calculation. One of the difficult things about PKD is that it is very hard for antibiotics to reach into the cysts. CIPRO is one of the only antibiotics that has been proven to really get in there. It is the most widely prescribed antibiotic for PKD patients.
James was on these other antibiotics for a week. During that time, James got worse day after day. His nausea was uncontrollable. His kidney function got worse every day. His white cell count started skyrocketing, and his temperature was reaching 104.  His fevers were so bad that he was constantly shivering, then he got Tylenol, and then sweating profusely. He did this 24 hours a day and so he wasn't sleeping or eating. It was horrible. However, everyday, Dr. Y would come in and tell me he was getting better, that the antibiotics were working and his lab work wasn't reflecting it yet.
I started feeling absolutely helpless. I tried several times to tell Dr. Y how badly he was doing, but she stopped listening to me. She soon found out my schedule and would come to see James before I came in or when I wasn't in his room.
My family would call me every day and ask how he was doing and I would just cry and say he was getting worse. I didn't know what to do. No one was listening to me and I started doubting myself. I started believing that I wasn't strong enough to help him, no matter what I did. So I just held his puke bucket and let him whither away. The strange thing was that even though he was so bad, Dr. Y really did think he was doing better, so she took him off the heart monitor and sent him down to the regular recovery ward, where patients get checked just a couple times a day. Unbelievable.
No, here's what was unbelievable, I actually left him to go to work after he had been in the hospital about 5 days. I never should have done that and I have learned my lesson, because while I was gone, his heart rate spiked. It got up to 250 and James says that 12 people rushed the room with the crash cart ready to resuscitate him. He says he was glad I wasn't there because he knew that would have scared the life out of me. It might just have.
I was finishing up my route at the post office when he called begging me to get back. They had moved him back upstairs to telemetry and back onto a heart monitor. My work was an hour and a half from the hospital and I had a total meltdown on the way back. I was screaming and crying in the car. I finally called my mother-in-law. She is a nurse and a PKD patient. I had been trying to leave her out of it because they were on vacation in Ohio and I didn't want to ruin their trip. However, James had almost died, again, and I couldn't do it by myself anymore. I told her what happened and I begged her to get on a flight and get to California as soon as she could.
Bless her heart, she spent the whole next day on airplanes and finally made it by about 7:00 pm. Just having her there was a breath of fresh air. I knew that she could get James better and I was absolutely right.