The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

Rattlesnake Adventure (part five) Welcome to the ICU

Another picture I took that fateful day at a place that I now lovingly call Rattlesnake Ranch.

I was finally headed up to ICU.

The morphine was fun, but it wasn’t doing a great job keeping my pain at bay. The nurse asked me where my pain was on a scale from 1-10, 10 being the worst. I answered that it was around a nine.

She said I’m going to try another medication with you. It’s called Dilaudid. For those of you who have never had Dilaudid...I’m sorry.

The nurse shot the drug into one of the many tubes dangling from my arms, I felt this weird feeling creep up the back of my neck and then, then...Nirvana. What snakebite? You doctors and nurses sure are pretty—and nice—and good conversationalists. Can we all live together in a house by the sea?

The bad part about my stay in ICU was that it is a little clouded by my friend Dilaudid. The good part about my stay in ICU was that it is a little clouded by my friend Dilaudid.

The first person I met in the ICU was my cute male night nurse Page who helped me into my big new high tech bed with all the bells and whistles.

Page hooked me up to monitors then poured fluids, antivenin, and really good drugs down my veins. He brought me pillows, warm blankets, pudding, and Jello—and gallons of ice water.

He brought me little green socks, moisturizer for my lips, toothbrushes, and combs. He had to watch as the stubble grew on my big fat ugly blue leg and helped me brush my teeth and change my foley (that would be my urine bag).

The only thing I could say that was remotely bad about Page was he liked to talk rather loudly during the middle of the night with the other bored nursing staff. But what he took from me in sleep, he gave back to me in Dilaudid.

My daytime nurse was a guy named Ip. Ip was equally as saintly as Page. He performed all the same duties as Page—except Ip took a special interest—in my urine.

The first few days of my hospital stay, I had many visitors. Each time one came and sat in the chair next to my bed, Ip would take this as an opportunity to empty my foley, which just happen to be hanging by the feet of my guests. I found it quite amusing to watch my poor disconcerted visitors shrink away in awkward disgust as Ip emptied the foley in to another container. (I couldn’t see this, but I’m sure it probably splashed a little. It is liquid, after all.)

Then Ip would hold the golden fluid up to the light, get a big smile on his face and say in his wonderful Taiwanese accent, “dat’s a goo ouput.” How can you not love someone who loves your wee-wee so much?

Rattlesnake Adventure —Part Four —The ER Continued

Just four clicks away from snakebite.

“Would you like us to resuscitate?”

Is that a trick question? If I flat line, do you just call it a night and go out for a cheeseburger?

Of course I want you to resuscitate. If you can jump start me, feel free.  I just don’t want to do that whole vegetable thing.

The next admin employee who approached me was looking for money. She had me sign something promising to pay. Thank God for insurance I would find out later.

I am a bit confused however, about the legality of signing something in the state I was in.

You see, at that precise moment, I had a rather strong cocktail of rattlesnake venom and Morphine pumping through my system.

Aren’t you supposed to sign legal papers when you’re of sound mind and body.” I think we all agree that neither my body nor my mind was particularly strong—or sound—at the moment my shaking hand attempted to scratch my signature across the page.

Shortly after signing my house over to some grifter, I attempted to sit up.

A nurse asked me what I thought I was doing. I told her I had to tinkle (I’m not sure of the exact wording). She told me I had two choices, neither one including getting up. Now, the last time I had a catheter I was unconscious. I wasn’t unconscious this time, but at least I was visiting with  Mr. Morphine. The nurse said I would thank her later and hooked me up. I had gallons of fluids running through me so I not only thanked her later, I thanked her sooner.

Doctors and Nurses alike were asking me the same questions over again. My favorites were, “What kind of snake bit you? Did you see it? Are you sure it was a rattlesnake?” First of all, we live in Northern California. The only venomous snake in Northern California is the rattlesnake. So after the second time the question was asked I started saying things like Cobra, Anaconda, Black Mamba. My humor was not appreciated.

I received my first does of Crofab at 5:40. It had taken the pharmacy two hours to deliver my first dose of antivenin. The swelling in my leg had traveled past my knee to my upper thigh.

I don’t know why it took so long to receive the antivenin, my guess is it is hard to find six people in a busy hospital who have nothing to do for forty minutes. It was hard to fault anybody. The hospital staff who were tending to me were extremely caring and professional. Well, with a couple exceptions.

Now the first bag of Crofab was almost empty, another one was on it's way and it was time to move me to ICU.

I was unhooked from my monitor and hooked up to a portable monitor equipped with paddles in case I coded on the way to ICU. I was ready to go but no one else was. So I sat there—staring at the paddles. The battery in the monitor beeped every few moments as if to remind the ER staff to start moving me down the hall. The beep sounded just like a cell phone running out of juice. So I was amused to see the entire staff checking their cell phones every time my monitor beeped.

Jill went home after spending three hours with me in the ER. I was taken up to ICU at around 7:00

My sausage foot waving good-bye to the ER and the curtain.

Stumble It!

Rattlesnake Adventure - Part Three - The ER,

(Language may not be suitable for kids.)

Another photo from my rattlesnake adventure minutes before I was bitten

People have asked me why they didn’t have the Crofab ready for me when I was wheeled into the emergency ward.

My answer is: This is what I know about Crofab.

Crofab is an antivenin that is made from immunoglobulin fragments from healthy sheep that have been immunized with one of four types of North American snake venom.

Crofab comes in little vials. Each vial is reconstituted with 10ml of sterile water and must be mixed by hand. The mixing is done very slowly. The vial is rolled back and forth in the palm of some medical staffers hand.

It takes up to 45 minutes to reconstitute. In the meantime your tissue disintegrates into porridge.

The reason Crofab is reconstituted so slowly is this: If it is mixed too fast it will foam, causing the proteins to break apart and rendering it useless. There is, of course, some debate about the foaming issue.

Several reconstituted vials are then mixed into a bag of saline solution and given intravenously to the patient, in this case —me.

The number of vials per bag of saline varies. They used six vials per bag of saline in my case.

Back to the story:

My sleepy EMT guys had just wheeled me through the doors of the ER, through the curtains of my treatment room, and then scampered off to get double caramel macchiatos.

Now it might have been the elephant sitting on my chest, or the bees buzzing under my skin, but there sure did seem to be a lot of people sharing the room with me.

There were not only people in the room with me.

There were people peeking through the curtains as well.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that people were staring at me. Did snake venom make you paranoid also? Every time the curtain opened, would there be a new person staring in?

I looked up at the curtain again and I recognized a face, it was my neighbor, Jill. Jill is a firefighter. She had heard through the firefighter grapevine that someone in her neighborhood had been bitten by a rattlesnake and she figured out it was me. It was one of those perfect moments, when you are never so happy to see someone in your entire life.

Jill sat down beside me. I showed her the wound and she started snapping pictures. What are friends for if they can’t take embarrassing pictures of your giant sausage leg and post them on the internet?

After the pictures came the happy words, “We’re going to give you something for the pain.”

Oh Joy! Hello Morphine. Good-bye pain, or caring about the pain anyways.

My leg was now swollen up to my knee and the swelling was showing no signs of stopping.

There was more scribbling on my leg—where they had located a pulse (very important) swelling measurement lines and swelling progression lines.

At one point, I think I even saw one of the busy nurses jotting down her grocery list.

Rattlesnake Adventure (part two)

My leg approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes after the envenomation.

Luckily, what I thought was the ambulance driving past the private road was actually the ambulance turning onto that very same winding, bumpy dead-end road.

Slowly.

My BFF Jacqueline had stood at the corner of the road to make sure the EMT guys didn’t do exactly what I was dreading—miss the turn.

My other friends, Stephanie and Nihal came running ahead of the firemen to help me. They actually lifted me, and all I could think about was the large protein shake I had had for lunch, and how much less I would have weighed without it.

Jacqueline opened the gate for the firemen, they walked toward me on foot. The Fire truck would not make it down the trail. They motioned for Stephanie to put me down (thank God the guilt about the protein shake diminished).

I lay on the trail on my side. I asked Nihal and Stephanie to take my shoe off because my foot was swelling at a very rapid pace.

Rattlesnake Adventure (part one) I Was Bitten By A Rattlesnake

Written 5-15-10

The picture I took right before the snake bite

How far does a girl have to go to get face time with her friends?

Dinner parties are great but you are always busy feeding everyone.
Coffee is great but everyone comes and goes and it’s loud. Bars are crazy; you can’t really have a conversation when you’re surfing.

So, I decided to try something new last Wednesday. I stepped on a snake, a rattlesnake—a four-foot long rattlesnake with a big mouth.
I have spent more quality face-to-face time with my friends in the past three days than I have all year.

Here’s the story:
I took two of my girlfriends daughters for a walk along with my dog and a neighbor’s dog. I was taking pictures of wildflowers for this very blog, the girls were chatting about horses and well up ahead of me on the trail and the dogs were cavorting through the brush.

The girls rounded the big oak tree up ahead of me and walked back towards me. They stopped and asked if they could run ahead to the horse barn about a quarter mile back to the trailhead without me and I said "yes."

This was one of the best decisions I had made all day.

How to Divide and Repot Your Cymbidiums. (or, Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Wrong)

When my mom died she left me dozens of cymbidiums. She died in April several years ago, and within days of her death I had hundreds of these amazing orchid flowers.

It was just like my mom to leave this world filled with flowers. It was her way of saying, “It’s O.K., life goes on, and everything will be alright.”

When I think of my mom I will always think about her love of dirt. The way she would spend morning until night gardening. Even in her eighties she would garden every chance she got. That is the one thing that never slowed for her.

So here I was with all these cymbidiums.

Hmmm. They flowered for many years after her death, every spring, no matter how much I abused them. Along with her orchids my mom left me a third of an acre of garden. So, with my own two acres—and my two little boys—time was scarce and the poor hard-working orchids were put on the back burner.

This year I noticed that there were very few blooms and very little new growth, maybe because the pots were so overgrown that many had split. In fact, some even had full-grown plants sprouting up from the ground through the orchid pots. I was an orchid abuser. Yes, among all the other things that I abused, I now had to add cymbidiums to the list.

Cymbidiums should be divided about every three years. If your plant has filled the pot and is now pushing against the side it is time to repot it.

So, after years of neglect, I finally broke down and started to divide them. Of course, I divided them right in the middle of their bloom cycle, so the small amount of blooms they had would never continue to fruition. Sad face. You are supposed to divide your cymbidiums after the old blooms have fallen off.