Black Friday

I am writing this from my hospital room at Blodgett Hospital in East Grand Rapids. Hopefully, this is my last day at this facility, and I can travel home tomorrow. But that’s the end of the story. Let me take you back to the beginning.

Wednesday, November 23 started out not that much different than any other day. I have a tendency to drink a lot of water lately. One of the reasons for that is I get some blood in my urine from time to time and I don’t want the blood to clot and cause an impasse. I had gotten up a few times that particular night, without incident, and my urine was clear.

However, later that morning, I went into the bathroom for the other transaction that can take place in a toilet, and noticed some bright red blood in the toilet when I finished. Once again, this wasn’t really out of the ordinary, I’ve had this happen before. My urologist tells me that when this happens to keep drinking water and try to pass the clot.

So that’s what I did. The problem was, even after drinking a bunch of water, I wasn’t able to pass the clot. After consulting my doc, he advised I go down to the ER and get it checked out. So I called Holly, and she came home and picked me up and brought me to the Butterworth Hospital ER.

Imagine this, if you will. You drink a bunch of water and then not being able to pee at all. If you’re thinking that that sounds pretty horrible and excruciating and painful, well, you would be right. Sitting in the waiting room at the ER was becoming more and more awful, and I let the people there know that my pain had peaked to about 11. They’re looking at a scale of 0-10, but I needed help fast.

After much carrying on and becoming increasingly belligerent, they got me into a room and put in a catheter to drain the urine. Ahhhhh. Sweet Jesus, sweet relief. In my euphoria, I’m thinking, okay, that’s taken care of, let’s get outta here. Silly me.

The catheter provided temporary relief to an immediate problem, but didn’t really do anything to address the real problem, the blood clots in my bladder.

A little history. When I was first diagnosed with prostate cancer, I opted for a prostatectomy, a complete removal of the prostate. However, after having my prostate removed, my PSA continued to rise, so it was determined that I would need radiation therapy of the prostate bed. I had 38 sessions of radiation, and my PSA temporarily went to zero.

Over the years, there has been some bleeding. If I workout hard and take ibuprofen, sometimes I get blood in my urine. This has been ongoing for quite some time. I have to be very careful not to take too many anti-inflammatories.

With my Pluvicto treatments, I’ve had some pretty significant bone pain. I’ve been careful to take stuff like Tramadol and other pain killers, such as Tylenol, but I’ve also taken a few advil. Not much, but it has helped.

Anyhoo, back in the ER, it was determined that I should stay the night as they tried to figure out what the source of the bleeding was. I wasn’t very happy with that decision, but certainly understood it.

Eventually, my rather small catheter was replaced with a larger one in hopes that the blood clots would pass through it more easily. But the clots just kept coming and eventually they clogged up even the bigger catheter.

After a real horrible Thanksgiving morning of having clots removed in a process called irrigation, eventually my urine ran clear again, and some semblance of relief was provided. But because I was still getting clots, I spent a second night in the hospital.

At around 1 a.m. Friday morning, I was pretty uncomfortable laying in my hospital bed, trying to sleep. If you’ve ever spent anytime in a hospital bed, you know what I’m talking about. So, in an effort to get more comfortable in bed, I pushed up with my legs to try to lay on my side.

When I pushed up with my right leg, my femur broke. It sounded like a gunshot, and I just stared at my leg, which now had a grotesque hump in the middle of where was usually a smooth thigh.

The pain was immediate and excruciating. I screamed very loud. I mean, if it were summer and the windows were open, dogs would’ve been howling a few counties away. And when you make that much noise in a hospital at 1 in the morning, people come running.

Things get a little fuzzy after that. People telling me to breathe, people telling me it was going to be alright, people telling me they needed to take x-rays, and a lot of other stuff. All I remember is just pure pain, as bad as I have ever experienced in my lifetime.

(The one thing I did have going for me is that I’ve had experience with pain like that before because I’ve dislocated both my knee and shoulder multiple times. I’ve learned that the more you can relax, which on its face seems rather ridiculous, the more the pain eases off. So, laying there while they tried to get X-rays with a portable X-ray machine, I concentrated on relaxing the muscles around the break. Thank god, it worked.)

So, on Black Friday, when most people were running around looking for good deals on Christmas presents, I waited all day for surgery. Around 4 pm, I was taken into surgery to have a titanium rod put in my femur. But just before I was wheeled into surgery, Holly got a call that my dad had just died. Just another guy punch on the worst day of my life. Black Friday has a different meaning for me now.

I plan on writing a series of blogs that will explain the consequences and ramifications from that day. Decisions have been made regarding further treatments and where my life goes from here.

Because this particular blog is just a play by play of things that happened over a few days around thanksgiving, and all the trauma associated with it, I’m gonna stop here.

My next blog will be about how all this has effected me mentally and spiritually, and what we’ve decided to do moving forward.

Thanks for reading.

Peace