Released - Yeah! Dec 15, 2014

Released - Yeah! December 15

Posted Dec 15, 2014 9:47pm

I got up early again and got over to the hospital by 6 am. Joe and Jess were sleeping. Joe had a good night but was still on oxygen and the nurse was a little concerned about the cough. She was going to bring this up to the ortho team when they stopped by.

We ordered some breakfast while we waited for the doctors to come by. They came by around 8ish (which is later than normal.) The resident doctor on call (who had seen us on Thursday and Friday) came by. He was real pleased and said we could be discharged. He was not too concerned about the oxygen. He said if we could cut down on the oxycodone, it would help with his oxygen and he should do the spirometer at every commercial (if he were watching tv). He did not think an xray was needed for the cough. (We have been home for 3 hours now and I have hardly heard Joe cough - so that's good.)

Dr. Erickson's physicians' assistant also came by - Ryan Ballard. He too was pleased and he wished us well. We got our walking papers and instructions at about 10:00 (when he also received a good dose of meds.) Right when we were going over our discharge papers, a volunteer came in the room and said, "This next week we will have some celebrity's visiting the hospital and so we need a photo consent form signed." Too bad we were leaving, huh? The nurse was like "Who, who.???" The volunteer didn't know who.

After we had everything we needed, they said we could leave as soon as we were ready. I said, "Doesn't he need to be wheeled out in a wheelchair?" They were like, "No." Aren't you going to walk us out? Again, No. I said, geez when I had a baby, I couldn't walk out to my car. I had to be wheeled out to my car. They were like, "No, he can walk to the car. And so he did.

We forget things sometimes, like he was way too tall to get in the car without ducking his head and it hurt to duck his head. So we tried to help by pushing on his head -- not a good idea. STOP pushing my head, Joe says. Oh yeah.

We stopped about once an hour. One gas station desk clerk asked Jessica if Joe was blind. Joe was like, Hmmm I had no cane and I was walking up and down the aisles unassisted. Kind of funny. But everyone was great to us and we made it home. He was in a lot of pain when we got home and he went upstairs to his bed for a couple of hours.

He's up now in the recliner watching tv. I'll get up through the night to give him his meds. If any of his friends are reading, you may stop by and visit for short amounts of time. I say short amounts because he's still on a lot of medicine that makes him sleepy. We know you have school too. If you need our address, just text Joe. When he's awake, he'll text you back.

I'll keep updating until we have our 4 week appointment.