I have been discharged from hospital. Many people are assuming this is a good thing. They wouldn’t send me home unless I was all fixed up, right? It’s not as simple as that.
I went into hospital with a badly misfunctioning brain due to a buildup of toxins in my blood. I wanted that corrected, but even more I wanted to understand how to avoid the same thing happening again. I’ve never had good instruction about that. No doctor has yet devised a protocol that works for me. I’ve always been left to figure this out for myself and my body seems to be much less responsive to the usual answers than that of most people with this disease.
This time was going to be different. The doctor assigned to me last week was working on it. Her shift ended Sunday. I had a lot of trepidation about getting a new doctor on Monday. A few doctors have been great. A few have been terrible. A bunch have just been unhelpful. What would this next one be like?
She was good. And on Monday she said we would work together to figure this out. I literally wept with relief.
Tuesday morning she said I’d be going home on Wednesday and would have to complete that work myself. A couple hours later I was told that an extra day wasn’t likely to make a difference, so I would be discharged that day. I felt devastated. Back home to figure it out for myself. The same situation that put me in hospital minus my brain for most of the last two weeks.
So what happened? It’s not complicated. Health care resources in BC are dreadfully inadequate for current needs. This hospital was at 170% of capacity, and the charge nurse was pressuring my doctor to discharge patients and free up beds for new patients.
In that moment I felt betrayed, frightened, and unsafe. But after a few hours of thinking about it I realized I did have a couple new variables to consider as I resume looking for answers at home. The doctor also did something above and beyond to get me closer to being on the transplant list, which ultimately is the only real answer here. Everything else is just about surviving until I can get a new liver.
Maybe I can do this. I’m going to try.