Post Heart Catheter

Hey everyone. I am writing this in Microsoft word while I am laying in a hospital bed because the internet is being retarded :(. It is acting like the hotel was the other day and being “local” only.
Anyways! My catheter went well but was the worst so far! This morning was so crazy because I set my alarm wrong. I set it for 6:45 instead of 5:45 so that we could leave at 7 thinking my report time was 7:15. So I got up and took a shower with no idea about the time. I started to pack up my stuff so that we could leave quickly if we had to, if I had to stay overnight other something. When I started doing that I asked Dan what time it was and he said 7:06 and I was like ohh so 6:06 thinking he hadn’t changed the time on his laptop and he is like no it is really 7 and I was like SHIT we need to leave NOW! So I through on my sweat shirt, took my meds, and grabbed my phone and walked out the door. We headed down stairs into the subway. Once we got down there we looked on the map to see where we were supposed to go and realized that we needed to be at a different hospital across down (like 2 miles) that is no connected to the subway. I was really bummed because I had just taken a shower so my hair was wet and I was wearing pajama pants and a tank with my hoodie, so I wasn’t really dressed right to leave the hospital.
Then we got on the elevator we went up to our room so I could get the paper to see exactly where we had to go. That is when I realized we weren’t as late as I thought we were because we didn’t need to be there until 7:45. So we headed back down stairs to the parking lot and I was reading the paper that said I needed my medicine. I was completely frazzled at this point so I went back up stairs and got them and headed to the car. Now the streets out here are all numbers but the directions change so there is like 1st Street SW/SE and 1st Ave NW/NE or something like that (I’m not sure which way the Avenue’s are and which the Street’s are). So Dan started driving while I tried to read the map but as soon as I thought I had it figured out the direct change and I was confused again so I gave up and let Dan figure it out. I figure that’s what he gets for leaving the parking lot without knowing where he is going. We quickly found the hospital because as I said it was only about 2 miles total.
Once we were there parking wasn’t bad, Dan drove past the parking for the building we needed to be in because he wasn’t looking at signs and was driving too fast to give me a chance to read them and tell him where to go. So we got parked and went upstairs and checked in about 5 minutes early. When we got upstairs and checked in they gave Dan a pager that they would page to tell him when the procedure was starting, ending, and when he needed to come back. They gave me a number that matched to the pager so they would know which pager to page. I thought it was a pretty cool system. We sat there until 8:30-8:45 when they took be back to start prepping me. My surgery time depended on the person ahead of me so I didn’t get taken back until 10:30-11:00. They told me they were going to page Dan but I guess they didn’t because he told me he called around 12 because he was worried that he hadn’t heard anything yet and they said they didn’t start until about 11.
The doctor came in about 10 minutes before they took me back to tell me what he was going to do. He was a very nice man but told me very scary things. He told me that they would be putting the catheter in my neck and I started to tear up. He was so nice about it and told me I could still change my mind, even if they started I could tell them to stop and they would and that I did not have to do this if I did not want to. I told him it wasn’t that I didn’t want to I was just scared because I have never had it in my neck and was never told that was a possibility. Along with putting the catheter into my neck they were going to do an ultra sound and have me peddle a bike while lying down. I have had to do that before and while it wasn’t hard it wasn’t easy either. They gave me just enough medicine to help with my nerves a little, or so they said. They also gave me some local anesthetic and told me to tell them when it hurt. Well I cried and said owe multiple times. Then I could feel the stuff in my heart and my heart palpitations. So I cried a lot, the whole left side of my hair line was wet with tears. The hardest part about the bike is that I couldn’t see how fast I needed to keep it going and so they kept saying to go fast and keep it up in very high voices. I made it to the second level but could only go for about a minute on it so in total I made it 4 minutes. That test was to check for obstruction which they did not see any change in which is a good thing.
Because they did not find a problem there they did another catheter into my groin which did not hurt. Since I did not have to do anything they were able to give me more medicine to calm me down and help me get through it. I could feel the catheters in me which again was uncomfortable. This time they gave me something through my IV to make my heart rate go up as if I was exercising even though I wasn’t. The doctor had told me to take my medication this morning so that made me more tolerant of this special IV medication; therefore they had to use more in me to get any results. This test was to test for pressure. They said the pressure did increase at during excursion about when my symptoms got bad.
Since they got the answers to the questions they finished me up and took me to recovery. I was doing pretty well and since I did not have a lot of drugs to make me loopy I was awake and talking to them right away. Everything was fine and dandy until they got ready to take me down to a secondary recovery room. They checked my incision sites as Dan was brought back so that he could go with us, and everything looked good. The nurses moved on to check something else when all of a sudden I felt like my urinary catheter was leaking or something. It kind of freaked me out because all of a sudden I was wet. They asked me if I wanted to be cleaned up then or wait until I got down stairs which would take just a couple minutes. I said I would wait but about 30 seconds later I started to feel even wetter and asked to me clean up at that time. As soon as they pulled the covers off the realized I was bleeding from one of the incision sites in my groin. It completely freaked me out. It took one of the nurses putting pressure on it for a good 30-45 minutes and then putting a clamp on my leg for a while to stop the bleeding. They did have to give me fentinal which is a fast acting pain killer to help me get through that because the pressure hurt like hell. It took just over an hour to get it to completely stop.
At that time I was taken down stairs and cleaned up. I was also fed when I got down stairs. They asked me what I wanted and I choose a turkey sandwich with chicken noodle soup, vanilla ice cream, a banana and a sierra mist. Yum yum! It was good. They had given me a couple crackers when they started to re-pressurize my leg to settle my stomach.
As they were getting ready to do my discharge speeches the doctor came in. We decided that I would start off by taking a diuretic to help relieve the pressure. I will also be weaned off of one of my medications and put onto a medication I have taken previously. I was taken off it in the past because I was taking it with something else and my blood pressure was getting too low. So now we are going to try it alone. If these medication changes do not work over time then Dan and I will need to talk with this doctor again and discuss surgery. He says that removing some of the muscle can help relieve that pressure, however sometimes this diuretic can also. It is going to take a while to get to that point which really sucks, but it is a lot less time than if I didn’t have this pressure issue and we just continued to play with my medication.

Thank you for all your prayers! They worked and we now know why I am having so much pain.