It’s now November 12th and I just got moved out of the ICU! It was a bit exciting for the change of scenery. However, it took forever to get service. I needed desperately people to talk to. I was having pain from not moving so bad in what I still couldn’t move. It was very sore where so was laying on the bed.

I was also still having trauma issues mentally from trying to convince myself that this we real and not a false rabbit hole I went down in some of my hallucinations.

The first night was interesting, there was an old guy in the bed next to me and he kept trying to hang himself in the rails until then moved him late at night. They eventually moved him to another room.

The next day, I was once again ringing and people would not come for a half hour to an hour. I felt so helpless and sad that I survived. This was the first day I had the really mean (or over-worked) nurse that told my sister it was unrealistic that they would come to help me within a reasonable time. There was a new person placed in the room next to me. He had visitors that brought him a McDonald’s Chicken Nugget Happy Meal. The even fought over the toy.

The guy had a TV service and I didn’t because I am cheap and didn’t want to spend the ridiculous money they cost. (Almost 5 times the price of home cable for fewer channels.) That night he fell asleep watching Ghostbusters on AMC. It repeated all night so I could not tell what time it was and I had started to get terrors again. In the morning after breakfast, I was taken for a bath! My first one in months. It was so nice to soak in there and not have the pressure points of laying in that bed. However, after the bath, everything changed. The previous day the catheter was starting to burn and hurt and they changed it. They also ran a test and it tested positive for ESBL, so I had to be moved into isolation. Which meant that the nurses and everyone would need to gown up to see me.

The almost now non-existent nurses became even rarer. I had it arranged that my mother visited me for supper and my stepfather visited me most lunches that week to help me eat since my hands were very weak. Although during the meals that no one was there I tried hard to do some of it myself since it would take so long and I was hungry.

That week I also started doing more and worked with Physio and OT for trying some stretching and sitting on the bed. I was also moved by a Hoyer to sit in a wheelchair for about 2 hours a day for lunch. It hurt so much from the pressure on my butt. The next week they tried using the steady lift to try transferring me to the commode but that didn’t work very well, and the commode really hurt .

Near the end of the week, I made the decision to have the catheter removed. I was nervous about not being ready but I tried anyways. I needed help with the urinal so that relied on the almost non-existent nurses. My urges would not give much time either so, I ended up wetting myself a lot.

Given that anxiety had always been an issue for me, dealing with asking for help was very hard, it was even harder dealing with having to be cleaned. I was so glad that the following, Wednesday much sooner than expected I was moved off that floor to the rehab unit.