This is the conclusion of making Illness Payoff, continued from part 3 which can be read here. I wasn’t in the emergency room for very long, as soon as I made my way through the metal detector and into the registration line, a nurse walked by me and sensing that I was not well she stopped to talk to me. The nurse felt my pulse and said, “Sir, are ok, you look very pale, why are you hear”? I replied that I had a boil on my inner thigh that had become infected. The nurse told me to say here in line and she would be right back. Within a few minutes, the nurse came back with a wheelchair and took me back to the triage area and took my vitals.
While she was taking my vitals, I told her about my visit to the emergency room at Lakewood Regional hospital. After the nurse finished with my vitals she took me into an examination room close to the triage area and asked me to show her my wound. I slowly got up and dropped me pants. The nurse had a hard time seeing my infected wound, so she had me lean over the examination table and then she saw it. I knew it had to be bad because she told me in a hurried voice to just stay where I was and that she would be right back. The nurse returned with a hospital gown and a gurney. She told me to take my pants off and to put the gown on.
When the nurse came back, I was in the gurney and she had an orderly push me to a long hallway. It seemed like this hallway was very long cause all I remember was passing a lot of rooms before the orderly turned the gurney into an empty examination room.
It seems that my situation was very serious indeed, as within fifteen minutes or so a doctor came in and identified himself as the senior surgical doctor and almost at once he began looking, then poking and prodding at my very painful wound area. I am grateful that the nurse who was assigned to me saw that I was beginning to have a great deal of pain as a result of the doctors intense examination of my wound, because as soon as the doctor left the small examination room, she returned with a syringe and without hesitation gave me the injection directly into my IV tube in my arm.
Within about 3 minutes or so I felt the warm rush of the morphine injection wash away the pain, and almost at once I was relaxed and able to endure the doctors very detailed touching of my wound. Sadly this was the closest thing to any enjoyment I have had in some time, and while I do not do drugs for enjoyment, this made me feel pretty good and helped me to forget my dismal situation.
I remained in the emergency room examination area for close to 6 hours, and during that time three different doctor’s would examine my wound, during that time the senior surgical doctor along with another surgeon would attempt to lance and drain my wound, and my nurse would give me three more morphine injections to quell my pain.
The attempts to drain my wound were unsuccessful and it was decided that I would be admitted into the hospital so that I could be prepared for surgery as soon as possible. By the time the decision was made to admit me into the hospital, I had been in the emergency room for close to six hours, and even the multiple high-dosage injections of morphine hadn’t fully dulled my pain. Just before I was taken to my new room in the hospital the nurse came back in and gave me two additional injections; one a shot of Demerol and the other was insulin as my blood sugar was discovered very high and that what had helped my infection grow so rapidly I was later told.
The journey to my private room was almost surreal, I was so loaded from the multiple morphine and Demerol injections that as soon as the doctors had stopped making incisions on and around the wound that I had begun to fully feel the effects of the medical quality opiates coursing through my veins. The trip to my private room seemed as if it had taken hours when, in fact, it hadn’t been more that 10 minutes or so to make it to the room I had been assigned. Because I had been diagnosed with MRSA while I was in the hospital with cellulitis last year, so I considered a private room a county hospital upgrade as it is common practice to stack up to 6 patients into a room in the Los Angeles County Hospital system.
Strange as it may sound, once I was in my hospital room I got very little rest. it seems that someone from the hospital was popping in to have me sign something or one of the nurses or other hospital staff came in to check my vitals or administer medicine. I never got any real rest, except for the time in was in the post-surgical recovery room, and that was only because I was out cold from the anesthesia used while I was being operated on.
When I came to, my mouth was so dry that my lips felt like big tubes of meat on my face. The nurse wouldn’t give me any water, but let me have some ice chips which made me feel better. Within an hour or so from waking up I was taken into my private room and I do not know why, but somehow I felt so much better than I did when I initially came to the hospital. Little did I know that this would be my new home for close to two months.
The day following my surgery was my worst day ever while I was in the hospital; I was in serious pain and I was not getting at rest what so ever! I was poked and prodded by what seemed like were endless streams of doctors, nurses, and their trainees. Oh yeah in case you didn’t know, Harbor UCLA is a learning hospital which means while you doctor and assigned nurse check in on you during daily rounds, they are followed by all of the interns, and 4th year medical students, along with all of nursing trainees as well who were students UCLAs school of medicine.
They are all very polite and respectful, but after a while it really begins to wear you down! I didn’t know I could have refused to be examined by all of these doctors and nurses in training, but it was too late by the time I had been told, and since my doctor was very kind to me and went out of his way to help when he found out I was homeless because of my extended stay in the hospital, I figured the least I could do was be a helpful training dummy for his students!
Yes, I was now officially homeless! I suppose I knew it would come to this from the time I had checked into the hospital anyway. I knew I needed to have my rent paid every Friday, come rain or shine, and since I had fallen behind a few weeks ago, there was no way in hell that the manager would even consider letting me slide by, especially since I hadn’t even talked to him about being late on the rent.
It didn’t matter at this point. I was ill, very ill and even if they let me go home right them and there, I was incapable of caring for myself and without medical insurance I wasn’t in any position to pay for the in home care nurse I would require if I even considered going home, so here is the deal: I am homeless now and I would have to deal with whatever happened when I was discharged when it happened. That is all there was to this whole situation!
I was in the hospital for about 5 days When I was awoken to the sight of roughly 10 people standing over me in my hospital bed. They all had very official looking clipboards with stacks of unkempt papers jutting out from the sides. Before I could say a word once of the women in the crowd had introduced herself as the senior social worker for the hospital, and she went into a little bit of what I had told my doctor when he brought up my discharge which he thought would be in two weeks or so. I was so embarrassed and ashamed when I told him in front of his group of interns that I was homeless and I didn’t know where I would be living when I was discharged.
I think I had mentally drifted off a bit because I felt like I was reliving the moment when I told my doctor I was homeless and didn’t have anywhere to live. I felt so low, but the next thing I realized was all of the people who were with the Senior social worker were gone and she was talking to me in soft soothing tones. I looked into eyes and they seemed to know how I was feeling, with each beat of my heart I literally felt like I was growing smaller and smaller, like a small sub-human…but looking in this woman’s eyes made it all ok, her eyes seemed to talk to my heart saying it was all going to work out.
She explained that it was against the law for the hospital to discharge me to the streets since I had a large drain inserted into my leg; this drain was called a Penrose. the social work went on today she was actively looking for somewhere to send me when my wound was stable enough. So for now the hospital would be my new home. When the social worker left, I broke down and cried. I was in this place because I was seriously ill, and more than likely I would have ended up on the streets anyway since I only had enough money to pay for two more weeks, I would have had to put all of my belongings in a shopping cart and find somewhere to live on the streets. Today I was very sick, but I had somewhere to sleep and food to eat and I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon!
As I grew stronger I began asking my nurses about my wound and what I had found out was I had a hollow tube inserted into my leg called a Penrose.The Penrose was about the size of a nickel in diameter, and about ten inches or so long. The doctors had opened my wound and cut away all of the poisonous tissue, and to make sure it healed properly the doctor had made another incision and inserted this Penrose tube into the wounds and tied them together. The wound was not sutured up and was packed with sterile gauze bandages.
The packing in my wounds had to be changed two to three times a day, and this procedure was so painful that before the nurse began this procedure I was given a very large dose of Demerol directly into my IV. Within about 15 minutes or so I would be so highly medicated that the nurse could have cut off one of my feet and I don’t think I would have felt it. But even with this large dose of drugs I could feel the gauze bandages being pulled out from my wounds. The feeling was so intense that the first time the nurse attempted to remove the packed gauze from my wound I went into an instant heavy sweat so fast that it scared the nurse who called for the doctor to examine me. I was so weak and shaky and sweating very profusely.
I had initially checked into Harbor UCLA on October 21st, 2012, and I wouldn’t be discharged until January 4th, 2013. during that time, I had become one of the regulars at the hospital. There was about 30 of us in all, most of the others were either confined to a wheelchair as amputee’s because they simply couldn’t walk very well. I was given a wheelchair, but I soon found out that I couldn’t go across the street to buy cigarettes while I was in the wheelchair because if the security saw me across the street I would be discharged from the hospital as I was off the hospital grounds without permission. I was unable to care for myself with this Penrose drainage tube in my legs so I ditched the wheelchair when I needed to go to the store for cigarettes or food.
As I roamed around the hospital I soon discovered there was literally a hospital underground or secret society of hundreds of homeless men and women within the hospital. This was a pretty large group of homeless men and women who actually lived in the hospital. I was so surprised when I figured it out, but this was a county building and it was a big labyrinth of large rooms, corridors, and offices that were very warm in the winter rainy months as well as the perfect safe haven with a lot of armed security in the form of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s and private security officers hired by the hospital. If you knew where to go and how to cover yourself in case you were stopped by either the County Sheriff or hospital security it was the perfect place to live.
I was fortunate that my tiny boil on my upper inner thigh became so infected that it landed me in the hospital for two and a half months, if I wasn’t in the hospital I would have just ended up on the streets like thousands of other men and women living in Southern California, but because I had a serious medical illness that required surgery and the Penrose inserted into my wound who knows what might have happened to me. Because of the hard work of the social worker in the hospital system and a woman named Kim Barnette I was discharged on January 4th, 2013, and then transported to my new home at the JWCH Recuperative care program and medical clinic located in Bell Shelter in Bell, California.
This story is far from being over, but if you found my story of homelessness and recovery from a dismal situation interesting, then please consider subscribing to my blog. I will be publishing new stories about my life while I was homeless and short tales of my life while I was running wild and free long before I even knew there was such a thing as “real” homeless people! The link is above on the top right!
The post The conclusion of Making Illness Payoff appeared first on The Nocturnal Writer.