Continuing the Journey

Mike's Hospital Experience

Many of you know about my stay in the hospital, but also many probably don't. So I thought I'd write this little note to tell ya'll about what happened.

About a year ago I got hurt trying to sprint. It turned out to be an inguinal hernia. So this past Thursday, April 2, after my trip to the UK, I went into MP Shah Hospital in Nairobi for laparoscopy surgery for the hernia. I was scheduled to have the surgery, then spend the night.

The surgery went fine. However, back in the hospital room, where I was to spend the night, I began to get chest pains soon after coming out of the anesthesia. By 8 PM the pain was so severe, that I simply could not inhale. I think that it might have been the most painful experience of my life. The nurses called in doctors who gave me oxygen, and morphine to ease the pain and help me breathe. Then they took me into the Intensive Care Unit.

Before going to ICU, I telephoned Cindy on my mobile phone with the help of a nurse, thinking that it wouldn't be so great if she came in to see me in the morning and found that I'd died the previous night. So Cindy and Clair Good, our EMM boss who happened to be in Nairobi at the time, came to see me that evening in the ICU. I was hooked up to an EKG (ECG in British English) and the doctors took blood to see if I'd had a heart attack. It wasn't a heart attack. The doctors believe that it was a pulmonary embolism, which is having blood clots in your lung.

By Friday evening I was out of ICU and back in my private room. The primary treatment for blood clots is medicine that reduces clotting of the blood, what we sometimes call a blood-thinner. For some reason I wasn't responding to the oral medicine, so they had to give me injections, which is why I had to stay in the hospital for nearly a week. It seems that the oral medication is now working, so I don't have to get anymore injections.

So now I am home. Since Cindy is a nurse, I was actually able to leave a day or so earlier, and she gave me more shots until the pill began to work. Overall, it was a bit scary - probably more so for Cindy than for me.

I want to thank everyone who knew about it for their prayers. God is good, and I am doing fine. Because of the hernia operation I'm still walking a bit more slowly, but I'll soon be back to normal - not that I ever was exactly normal!

posted by Brislen Family @ 2:06 PM