A Month Full of Hospitalizations for my Major Medical Diagnoses

Maybe if the hospitalizations in the month of November had stopped there then things would have been okay, but life with major medical diagnoses is never that easy. First I went to the hospital for dehydration, Immediately after that bloodwork showed that my potassium was dangerously low. I had to rush back to the hospital.

One of my major medical diagnoses made my kidneys unable to retain potassium.

Dr. Rose added more potassium to my IV supplement bag.

I wasn’t even home two days before Jen took my blood pressure. As soon as it registered as 72/45 she called an ambulance. That time I stayed in the hospital four days. It didn’t even stop there. My blood pressure finally reached a normal range. I got to go home However, within a couple of days my heart began to beat so fast I could barely keep up with it. One of my major medical diagnoses is a disease called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS). This disease made my heart rate spike when I sat upright in my wheelchair too long. During the hospital admission for the severe effects of my POTS, they increased my dose of fludrocortisone. Dr. Rose also upped the rate of my bag of normal saline which was what provided me with my hydration.

Anything I drank by mouth exited my esophagus and went out my G tube. Nothing got absorbed or hydrated me. My GI tract was too non-functional to digest anything by mouth or even absorb any more water via my J tube.

Jeff and His Loyal Visits Despite His Major Medical Diagnoses

No matter what, every time I was in the hospital for any of my major medical diagnoses, Jeff came to visit me every single day. Sometimes he got rides from Melody or Lauren. Other times I would pay for an Uber through the app on my phone. if I paid for the Uber I would then call Jeff and let him know how far away the driver was, what kind of car they were driving etc…

Jeff would dig into his own account to pay for cabs if I couldn’t find any Ubers or Lyfts around. If it really came down to it, he would find a woman and pretend to have a romantic interest in them and convince them to drive them down to the hospital to visit “his sick little sister who has major medical diagnoses”.

During the last week of November, I was actually home for the full week.  This should have been something to celebrate. fand I should have been the happiest couple on Earth. We were finally side by side at Side by Side, and we were both still alive. The major medical diagnoses seemed to be something we could put on a shelf and not think bout for a little while.

This was not the case.

On November 27^th Melody was working.  Jeff and I had been hanging out in bed playing around with my build-a-bears and his bear Oscar, and pretending that they were talking to each other.

Mental Illness, Trauamatic Brain Injuries, and Major Medical Issues

That day Melody had to bring her two nephews, Max and Jared whom she had adopted as her own. Their real parents had been neglectful drug addicts.

As I’ve mentioned in past posts, these two kids could get extremely out of control. Max and Jared could get to the point of being violent and needing the police and psych crisis called on them.  They had both spent time in locked children’s psychiatric units, and they were both mentally very fragile.  Their list of mental health diagnosis were a mile long each.

Jeff himself had a traumatic brain injury at age 17 when he fell headfirst out of a pickup truck while completely intoxicated and then didn’t get treatment. This first incident changed his life forever. He had a second traumatic brain injury just several years before meeting me when he abruptly stopped drinking. 

Jeff’s Brain Injuries

He’d been living on a friend’s couch and his friend had thrown a party.  Jeff, with his willpower of steel, did not drink a single beer at the party. A doctor told Jeff that if he didn’t stop drinking and go on the liver transplant list, he would die. The problem was that no one had told him that you can’t abruptly quit drinking all on your own.

Because he just quit all at once, in the middle of the party, Jeff had a grand mal seizure. He went into status epilepticus for a prolonged period of time. His friends were too busy hiding all the drugs before calling 911 to get him help.  Prolonged grand mal seizures deny oxygen to the brain. This is what happened to Jeff. It caused what’s called, “an anoxic brain injury”. His brain injuries had damaged mostly the frontal lobe of his brain, so he was more impulsive, got angry quickly, and had no patience.

The combination of Jeff with Max and Jared was never a good one, and Jeff was under extra stress because of all the health scares that we had just been through with me. The fact of our shortened life spans due to our major medical diagnoses had just been shoved in our faces. We were both acutely aware of our own and each other’s mortality.

Jeff Jumping to My Defense

Jared started calling my teddy bears dumb. Then he started asking why we were playing with teddy bears if we were adults. Jeff turned on him full force.

“Becca’s teddy bears mean everything to her! How dare you call them dumb!  Do you even know half as much as this poor girl has been through? If you did you wouldn’t even think about calling them dumb. She loves them like a mom loves her babies.”  Jeff yelled at him.

Jared looked baffled for a minute before spitting back a retort.

“Then why don’t you give her real babies, or are you broken too, just like she is?”

“She is far from broken, I could kill you for saying that, I could squeeze my hands around your scrawny little neck and snap it.  She is the most unbroken person I know.” Jeff screamed at him, his face turning red and vein near the top of his forehead popping out.”

I put a hand on Jeff’s shoulder, he was now sitting up, ramrod straight in the bed, poised to attack.

The Reaction to The Blow Out

“He’s just a little kid, he doesn’t know what he’s saying. All he wants is to get a rise out of you,” I xplained to Jeff.  Although inside I was fuming at this Jared kid too.

“How dare you threaten my kid like that? I could call the cops on you for that threat,” Melody jumped in.

A knot was developing in the pit of my stomach. Out of all people, I thought Melody would be more understanding of Jeff. But Melody was being Momma Bear and protecting her baby. jeff had just threatened her baby’s life.

“How dare he call my Becca broken and make fun of her! She has just been through so much hell as it is!” Jeff shot back at her.

“He’s eleven, and he has a lot of mental health issues,” Melody told him.

“I don’t care, he can’t hurt my Becca,” Jeff insisted.

Jared was smiling a devilish grin. Jeff caught it, I caught it, Melody missed it.

“I want him out of my house,” Jeff said.

“This isn’t your house, this is Becca’s house,” Melody corrected him.

“It’s pretty much Jeff’s house too,” I told her.

“Well, what do you want to happen right now?” Melody asked me.

“I want to talk to just Jeff alone,” I told her.

Melody nodded curtly, and gathered up Jared, Max, and their video games. Then she told me to call her when I was done talking to Jeff.

Talking to Jeff

After the three of them were gone and it was just Jeff and me. He lay back down on the bed next to me and gathered me in his arms. I leaned against him in the embrace and just cried.

“I’m so sorry that little brat talked to you like that,” he told me.

“It’s not just that Jeff,” I explained to him. ‘I need you to get along with my caregivers and their kids so that I can get appropriate care. Otherwise, I will always have everyone leaving me.  No one is going to be perfect like you want them to be. That’s because we’re all human, and no human is perfect.

“So, what do you want me to do babe?” he asked me.

“I need you to go home and cool off a little. Let me talk to Melody, and then I will call you with the game plan, okay?”

Jeff seemed a little hurt, which scalded me deeper than even a burn. However, I also knew that I needed caregivers to survive and that I had to remedy this situation.

“Just please try not to say anything to them while you’re leaving. Just quietly slip away.  That would really be the best thing to do right now. We need to avoid escalating the situation.”

“I love when you use big words, you’re so smart.  I can’t wait to read your next book.”  Jeff smiled a genuine smile at me.

For the first time in the last hour, I felt a little relieved.

A Heart-to-Heart With Melody

Once I figured that I had given Jeff enough time to slink off, I called Melody up.

When she came back, I noticed that she was alone.

“Where are Jared and Max?” I asked.

“I had Serena pick them up so that we could have a heart-to-heart,” she explained.

Uh-oh, so far, I didn’t like the way this was going.

“I love Jeff, I think he’s a really great guy. He has a lot of inner strength, love, and a great sense of humor.  He also obviously loves and cares about you very much. The thing is, I can’t have him treating my kids the way he does,” she began.

“He doesn’t mean it,” I jumped in trying to explain how he’d been born a preemie of only 4 pounds, had multiple learning disabilities, ADHD, and probably some other undiagnosed psychiatric diagnoses, on top of his multiple brain injuries.

“It doesn’t matter if he means it or not. It’s just the fact that I can’t have him treat my kids like that no matter what.” Melody explained.

“What about all those times he’s let them play with his $400 remote control cars? Or when he brought them up to his apartment to teach them how to play the games on his $600 video game systems? Or all the times he’s printed out coloring pages for Max of all of his favorite Superheroes.”  I reminded Melody.

“He can be really great with them too,” Melody acknowledged, “but he threatened to kill an eleven-year-old boy today, for acting like an obnoxious eleven-year-old boy.”

Melody’s Ultimatum

“What does this mean?” I asked, feeling a sense of heaviness invade my body. Part of me didn’t know if i wanted to know where this was going. It was easier to deal with my major medical diagnoses than confrontations like this.

“It means you need to make a decision,” Melody told me.  “Either stay with Jeff and find a new PCA who can tolerate him berating their children and turning everything into a joke. Or I will stay with you, but Jeff cannot ever be over here again when I work.”

For a moment I was the dog who strayed past the invisible fence and just got hit with a big shock of electricity.

Melody was the one who had played matchmaker and had put Jeff in my life as my life partner.  She was the one who had, with the help of my teddy bears posing as Jeff, helped me learn how to kiss and enjoy it.  It was Melody who had encouraged me to bite the bullet and let Jeff “pop my cherry”.  She was forever patient with me and saved my life multiple times.  I always looked forward to having her work and laughing and smiling and chatting with her.  She always appeared to get along with Jeff.  My assumption had always been that they had some sort of understanding.  I knew Jeff thought Melody was a good PCA for me, and that she was one of the only PCAs he had ever approved of completely, and yet here she was giving me an ultimatum.

“But you’re here over five hours some days,” I protested.  “I can’t be away from Jeff for that long.”

“It’s either him or me,” she told me.

I Choose Jeff

It was a no-brainer, but it was a painful no-brainer.

“I choose Jeff,” I told her simply.

I don’t know what else she expected me to say, it was plainly obvious how much in love Jeff and I were. There was nothing in the world that could break us apart.  As we always told each other, we loved each other unconditionally and forever.

Melody nodded and picked up her Mary Poppins purse, which seemed to hold the kitchen sink, the bathroom sink, a mini-fridge, and the rest of her life. She gave me a quick nod, and without saying much else, left my apartment.

Picking up my phone, I pressed my finger on the photo of Jeff and me and heard it start ringing on Jeff’s end.

“All right Jeff,” I told him.  “Coast is clear, you can come back over.”