The adventures keep coming

Well I just reread my last post and was surprised at how positive it sounded. Bob was not better. He was continuing downhill. He could not keep any liquids down and was vomiting and had diarrhea. We finally called the advice nurse from our insurance company and she was very clear that I should take him to the hospital to get rehydrated. So at 7 pm we left for the hospital. Luckily there is one less than 3 miles away. The RV place was very good about giving us printed directions to things, including the hospital. There was a long wait in the ER waiting area. Bob looked like he was getting weaker and weaker. when they finally took us in they moved pretty fast and began rehydrating him, giving him antibiotics, taking EKGs, blood work, CT scans. They were even worried about the wound on his foot from walking on a pebble. At about 11 pm they told him that they wanted him to stay overnight. They htoiught he might have pneumonia. By 1 pm he was in a room. Although they would have allowed me to stay the night, I decided to go home because I was not feeling well. I did not sleep well that night and got up with a pretty good headache. I got back to the hospital. by this time the doctor had come in to see Bob and told him that it was not pneumonia, it was just the old scar from his surgery. But then another doctor came in and told him that they were worried about his heart. While I was there he had diarrhea several times and the last one was black, i.e., bloody. So we told the nurse and she ordered occult blood test for the stool. Guess what, it came back positive. By now I was feeling pretty bad. So I went home, got in bed, and immediately started getting nauseous. After I had a pretty violent vomiting epid=sode I wanted to make sure that Is tayed hydrated. So I stayed in the air conditioned trailer all day and kept drinking as much as I could. At about 5 pm Bob called and said that they wanted him to stay another night because of the bloody stool and the heart issues. By 8 pm I was feeling better. I got a pretty good night's sleep and got the hospital at about 7 am. (I wanted to be there when the docs came in.) I asked Bob a lot of questions about what the docs had said. He didn't know the answers and told me that he was confused by it all. I told the nurse that Bob was confused and she came in and repeated what the docs had said. They were asking a cardiologist and a GI specialist to do a consult. Bob was feeling pretty poorly and they were still giving him saline by IV so it seemed good that he was still there. His appetite was still pretty bad. Finally the cardio doc came and shoed us the EKGs. They were clearly irregular and we had no idea if that was normal for Bob. She wanted to do further tests. We said okay to a stress test, but they wanted to do somehting more invasive. We talked about it a long time and even called Stef. We decided that if we were going to get that kind of test we wanted it in Portland where our records were. The GI doc wouldn't do anything until the heart issue was resolved. So at about 3 pm, the hospitalist doc came in and gave us all of his records and released him. When I saw the records I understood why they wanted to hospitalize him. He was seriously dehydrated and there were lots of other issues. But he was finally released at about 5 pm. I went and got his prescriptions filled and we tried tos ettle down. Neither of us was feeling very good, but it was better to be home. But we both woke uyp this morning feeling much better. We had a good night's sleep and we both ate a good breakfast. We are going to stay where we are for a few days and then decide what to do next - probably drive home.