While I was in the hospital, I had this picture of me setting up this fabulous blog that would follow my journey to a healthier me. I would share the weight loss tricks I was going to learn, post healthy, delicious recipes - with gorgeous pictures, of course, share new tips for simplifying life, and so on. As you can see, that dream is not yet a reality. Somehow, life, and recuperating from a brain hemorrhage, and learning to deal with diabetes, just got in the way.
I spent 11 days in the hospital, most of it in the Neuro Critical Care Unit. I had an IV going constantly, and they had me taking all kinds of medications. The nurses would come in and say, "It's time for medicine." Most of them told me exactly what I was taking and what it was for, and I got to where I recognized them, but I don't remember now everything I was taking. I had a pain killer for the headache, which was constant, and since I am very sensitive to most medications and any heavy duty pain killer makes me sick, I also had an anti-nausea pill so I could tolerate the pain killer. I had several medications to prevent seizures and stuff like that.
The first time they brought out one of those seizure pills I took one look and knew I wouldn't be able to swallow it. It was a gel coated liquid capsule, an inch or so long and proportionately wide - about the length of a Mike and Ike candy, but much fatter. I had to take two of them each time. I told the nurse I would try it, but probably would not be able to swallow it. She said, that's okay. If you can't swallow it we just puncture it and squeeze the liquid into your mouth. I remember thinking, if you do that I must not be the only one who can't swallow them. Why don't they just make it as a liquid dose? I couldn't swallow the pill, so the nurse punctured one end and squeezed the liquid into my mouth. I was supposed to hold it under my tongue as long as I could before swallowing, since it was supposed to absorb into the tongue and mouth. I took lots of those pills over the course of that 11 days. Some of the nurses would squeeze the liquid straight into my mouth, some would squeeze it out into a cup then suck it up in a syringe (non-needle kind) and use that to squeeze it into my mouth. After a few days they were just poking the capsules then handing them to me for me to squeeze the liquid out into my mouth. The liquid had a slight minty taste, and kind of reminded me of flouride treatments at the dentist. I remember thinking, if they are making it mint flavored, they must know that lots of people can't swallow that pill, otherwise they wouldn't worry about how the liquid tastes.
The nurses would tell me to let them know when I needed pain killers. I was taking oxycodone and tylenol. I couldn't always remember what time I took which one, and would lose track of when I could take the next dose, so one of the nurses started a chart on the whiteboard, listing when I could take the next dose. He was also the nurse who helped me come to the conclusion that it was better to take the medicines on a regular schedule and not let the headache get out of hand instead of waiting until my head started hurting badly before asking for pain medicine.
They brought me medicines about every 3 hours, since everything was on different schedules. We joked about my pill "meals", since some of them looked like a meal, with 6 or 7 or more different pills, plus shots, sometimes in my skin, sometimes in my IV. Thankfully I didn't take quite that many medications home with me, and got to taper off most of them.
