Cali ended up in the hospital again!! Thank goodness it was only for 24 hours, but it was still very scary! She may be smiling in this picture, but she was hurting and VERY scared!
Cali was pulling her hair up to go to get her INR levels tested (how thick or thin her blood is) and came in to me and asked, "Is it weird that when I move my arm or breathe in real deep it hurst right here?" She was rubbing the left side of her neck and when she moved her hand I noticed the swelling. So, back to the ER! The cool / interesting / funny thing about this trip was she ended up in the same trauma room with the same ER staff from her first time when she was life flighted. None of the staff realized it at first, since they were just making sure she was stable and safe, and she looked completely different from the first time. Once the commotion settled down, someone put 2 and 2 together and then all of a sudden Cali was famous! They all came in to touch her, talk to her, cry with her, tell her how much they worried about her. Some just stood at the end of her bed and shook their heads in disbelief that she had survived. I guess in the ER the staff has to sign a paper saying they won't seek out any of the patients once they leave the ER so the staff had assumed that with as bad as Cali was when she left them, that she had passed away since they couldn't check to find out. They were all very much in awe to see her not only alive, but looking so good. One of the docs that worked with Cali in one of the ICU's was in the ER and her nurse asked her if she remembered Cali. I happened to walk by just then, and when the doc said, "That name sounds familiar...?" I touched her shoulder and said, "Jo Nolast." She got all excited, so glad she would get to see her again!
I took these pictures when Cali was getting a CT scan. As you can see there are a lot of machines and equipment and from what they tell us they used every bit of it with a whole bunch of people trying to figure out what was wrong with Cali. (We got a little taste of it; while we were there another trauma came in and we were only separated by a curtain. It obviously wasn't as severe as Cali's was but it was still pretty organized chaos.)
Cali ended up having a few blood clots, the biggest one being behind her collarbone. Again she was the talk of the ER because she was stumping the doctors. Two days before this her INR levels were perfect (2.5) and this day they were 1.3; very thick so she was clotting even when they put the IV in her arm. And her platelets were at 1100 - a far cry from the 400 when she left the hospital a week ago. Not sure why her levels changed so drastically so quickly, but they are running tests for some different autoimmune diseases to see if she has any of them. The doctors who didn't know what Cali had been through recently were all ready to send her home because the clot is in a safe place (for a clot) and they knew they could manage it with meds at home. But the trauma docs once again went up to bat for us and insisted that if they didn't admit her, they would just put her in an ER observation room overnight so all of us - including them - would feel better about things. So Cali and I spent the night up on the 4th floor. She was released this afternoon - after a 24 hour stint in the hospital and is very grateful to be home... again!!
