Fun at the ICU in Salt Lake City

Its been a while since we have posted, everything has been crazy and busy but this week i have plenty of time so i guess i should update everyone.

(warning, its a long post with lots of fun details )

We haven't been out of town for a while so we finally decided to go last weekend for Jenny's Grandpas birthday and so that we could do a little shopping. Jens grandpa has a long time friend that is a gastroenterologist that said he could fit me in to do a scope down my throat to see why i cant take pills and choke often.

So we arrived at his office and i went in for the scope at 10:00, its a 15 minute procedure where i had an iv and was put out so he could scope my throat and then stretch it if needed. At around 4:00 that day i woke up in the ICU at Salt Lake Regional hospital laying in a bed with my pants off and a nurse holding a rubber tube like what i used to make slingshots in middle school....although that’s not what this one was for. ( too much information, but that's what you get when i write the updates instead of Jen :) A minute later i was throwing up blood and trying to figure out what happened.

Apparently after the dr scoped my throat as he was coming out he saw blood so he pulled the scope out and waited for a few minutes to see if it would stop. When he went back in he found that it was still bleeding meaning there was a small tear or hole caused by the scope and so i had to go to the hospital quickly to find out how serious it was. The Office is in the same parking lot as the hospital so they wheeled me over to the hospital, and had me drink something, then performed a catscan. From the scan they could see that there was air in my body showing that there is a leak from my esophagus. Luckily it was small enough that it didn’t continue bleeding and they couldn’t see the hole on the scan, so they didn’t need to do surgery at the time. Because a hole in that location carries a big risk of infection they had me go to the ICU to be checked constantly for any signs of infection or bleeding and that’s where I woke up.

After reading about it later we found that the chance of having a tear or hole made by a scope is somewhere around .1%-.01%. The condition I have apparently makes it easier to tear when being scoped, and stretching my throat would not help the condition and has a higher chance of ripping. We will figure out if there is anything we will do about the problem later.

So I was in the ICU for two days and will be in a normal hospital room for 6 days as long as everything goes well. I cant have anything go down my esophagus , even spit, so I have been fed through an iv and then later a picc line for 5 days now. I dream of eating hamburgers and chocolate now! So that’s our week, hopefully next week will get better.