Ambulance transfer and hospital room whiteboard

December 10, 2023

Right now, I’m back at Mayo. I came back here because I’m suffering from some after-effects of my surgery, like urinary and digestive tract problems, and we actually decided that I had to come back to Mayo Clinic after Saturday morning when I woke up throwing up. I definitely had also thrown up, uncontrollably at times, on both Friday night and Saturday morning. 

When we first arrived at Mayo this time around, we started in their ER. It was very helpful, even though things took a long time. I was able to get a CT scan and an MRI, and also a bladder scan. I wasn’t sure if I’d put this in here, but they were actually able to drain a full liter of fluid from my bladder. I was told that a normal “full bladder” would probably hold about 500 milliliters of fluid, and they drained 1,000 milliliters from mine, even though at the time I didn’t even feel like I had to go to the bathroom very much. I guess it’s just another sign that I may not be perceiving things fully. 

After working through some of these symptoms, it was decided in the ER that I should be admitted for at least a day of two to work on resolving some of these symptoms. They could be things caused by the surgery, or maybe just caused by a different, structurally problematic issue in my lower spine. 

Before I could be admitted inpatient to Mayo Clinic, I yet again had to be transferred between the buildings via ambulance. This time it did not happen at 3 a.m, thank God. The three EMTs who took me over were Patrick, Luke and Kellie. I had an amazing talk with Kellie in the back of the ambulance, and she’s the only one of them I didn’t grab a picture of, since I’ve got a picture of Patrick and Luke taking me out of the ambulance, and Patrick wheeling me into a building. At any rate, I don’t quite remember exactly what I told Kellie, but I’m certain we talked about names a bit, since she has my middle name as her first name. I know that I told them that my mom’s side of the family had everyone named with K or C names because of the last name, and Patrick said he had some distant family who did the same thing. 

All of this means that tragically, mom and I missed both Papa’s birthday dinner in Minneapolis, but it looks like Talia was able to pull through with some salmon and angel food cake, which I’m sure completely made up for me not being there. 

Anyways, now I’ve been I on the fourth floor of Eisenberg Building  for the last day. I’ve been able to get an X-ray, had a catheter taken out, and completed a “voiding trial.” We’re still planning on me being able to do the interventional neuroradiology treatment tomorrow, on Monday, on the other campus, St. Mary’s.

Ok, this entire thing was the CaringBridge post I made this morning. It’s the first one I’ve posted under my name, not my mom’s. I suppose it can work for both yesterday and today. The other cool news is that later in the day I had some big successing with my digetive tract situation. I’ll also note that I did my morning Turalio at 8:50 with some eggs and most of two cheese sticks, and my night Turalio at 6:02pm with a contatiner of vegetable lasagna that looked a bit small to be their large size of it, so I also had a cup or two of pudding from the hospital fridge.

I’ve also already decided on what meal I want for tomorrow morning. It’s gonna be the salted caramel shake, which has 14g of fat. We’re not sure why Mayo has perfectly accurate numbers for their whole shake menu and nothing else, but we’ll use what we can get.