Scenes from the ICU

Me on Thursday, my second day in the ICU.

Hello from St. Joseph’s Health Centre! As I write this, I’m sitting in a regular hospital room, having been transferred out of the intensive care unit a couple of hours prior. I’ve been here since Tuesday afternoon (it’s Saturday now), when I checked in with a 40C (104F) fever, a heart rate of 110 beats a minute while slumped over in a chair and symptoms that looked like a combination of laryngitis, bronchitis and pneumonia.

Here’s what was hanging over my head to my right the entire time: vital statistics monitoring equipment and IV pumps:

Hanging over my head was this sign:

My throat has swollen so tightly that they were worried it would be very hard to intubate me (run a breathing tube down my throat), should it decide to swell even further. In preparation for this sort of emergency,  someone brought a tracheotomy kit into the room.

If you’ve been struggling to come up with a name for your new band or album, you might want to consider “Difficult Intubation”.

Here’s my right arm:

I’m off the IVs now, but from late Tuesday afternoon until about the same time Saturday, some kind of fluid has been been run into my veins: lots of saline, some glucose, and a whole lotta meds, either via syringe or intravenous drip, not to mention a couple of pills including a fair bit of Tamiflu.

And finally, here’s the view I’ve had, looking straight ahead from my bed for the past few days:

Between my being completely out of commission on Tuesday and Wednesday and the ICU’s equipment interfering with 3G signals, I’ve been relying on third parties to let them know that I’ve been in the hospital. I thought I’d quickly bang out this blog post to let people know that I’m still here, but in a much better, non life-threatening condition. The fever’s gone, my heart rate’s normal and my lungs are fine – I still have laryngitis and the doctors are trying to suss out what’s going on with my throat. With some more antibiotics and a little luck, I’ll be out of here soon.