Sparklette77,
I'm appalled by your treatment at your hospital.
It sounds like, despite the fact that you are a well-educated professional (insured and self-pay), you were treated like an entitlement-minded, drug-seeking user of the system on Medicaid. I know, because my wife was a doctor in the Public Health Service. She saw that behavior at Cook County Hospital in Chicago where she did her residency. She often had to do duties for patients on her rounds the nurses didn't feel like doing.
At St. Luke's Boise, where I got my own mitral valve repair 12/12/07, I was treated like royalty in comparison to you. I was never permitted to experience any incision or sternum pain while I was there--within reason of course.
Some pain can be a real friend, helping you keep from doing too much too soon. The only bad pain was during my pacing wires removal (see my album at my profile), and the finger sticks for blood glucose levels. St. Luke's Boise is also supposed to be the local 'charity' hospital. However, even the indigents and non-insured are well taken care of. The cream of the nursing crop, however, was reserved for the ICU and Telemetry floors. I'm shocked that the nursing staff even in such critical care units as cardiac ICU at your hospital had such a blasé attitude toward real human suffering. What are they trying to do? Get their hospital sued out of existence? That accusation of you wanting to deal drugs with a pain medication refill with a verified
recent OHS on your medical records is quite frankly just plain insulting.
As for the walking part--I want to change tone here to more positive
--I went outside. It is cold in southern Idaho like in NY. My solution was to us a heat-exchanger mask. There's several brands out there. The one I use is PolarWrap. Others I can think of are Psolar and BreathXChange brands. They rely on the fact water has a high heat capacity. When you breathe out, the water in your breath condenses temporarily on some inner portion of the mask, then when you inhale, the warm water condensate re-evaporates, returning the heat to your lungs. Most of the time, it just feels like you're breathing humid normal room temperature or slightly above air, while the rest of you is outside. There is slight breath resistance, but trivial against the comfort of warmer air. The condensed water doesn't really accumulate, so you don't bubble and gurgle even after wearing it for hours. Since people lose about 50% of their body heat via their breathing, using a mask like this is very effective. Other people with OHS have used them in cold weather, as have cold-induced asthma patients--very successfully. I can say that it allowed me to be outside and walk long enough so that leg cramping rather than respiratory distress was the reason why I had to return home early. This was true even when it was below 10° F. In general, you don't have to dress up as much, and, unless your feet or hands actually get wet, you'll seldom experience cold fingers or toes since your body doesn't have to fight to keep your core temperature up with each breath--and can thus spare the blood to warm your extremities. Scarves and neoprene face masks have their place, but don't do nearly as well at actually warming up breathed in air, especially near the end of inhalation. Why am I going into such detail? It's because not only will you be reading this, but lots of other people who visit this forum, and I think that with winter being here, we OHS survivors need to take extra good care of our bodies, and I just wanted to pass on something that helped me immensely over the recovery period last winter as well as this winter. Don't worry about my having some sort of financial motive here. I don't own stock of
any kind--even my small IRA is just in the bank.
I have to admit, though, that when things got too icy outside for safety, my mother or wife drove me into Twin Falls to the indoor mall there so I could do my daily walking in comfort. Then resume outdoors when the ice had melted or fresh snow had fallen.
I hope you can forgive these people at the hospital, as they themselves may have had some sort of difficulties that you don't know of. Still, it's more for your own peace of mind to try to at least let at the hurt go, than for their benefit. Even if you're considering legal action, forgiving at the emotional level could help clear your head enough to see a logal course of how to proceed. I'll be praying for your quick and uneventful recovery--hopefully pain-free in the very near future.
Chris
