Well June
came with another surprise for me. On June 4th I suddenly started
getting double vision. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I didn’t know if
I was having a stroke or what. So I got in my car and YEAh, I drove to the
emergency room at the hospital. They gave me a CAT scan and an MRI of my head.
They didn’t see anything, which was good. At least I wasn’t having a stroke. But
they did put me in the hospital for 2 days. My eye lid started to close up and by
the time I got home I couldn’t open it up.
The eye doctor came in and examined me. The
doctor told me I had 3rd Nerve Palsy. My right eye was paralyzed. My
good eye would look straight ahead but my bad right eye looked in a different
direction. It made me nauseous. The eye doctor put tape over the right side of
the lens of my glasses. Now I could see with a single image instead of having double
vision. They told me that my eye would be back to normal in 3 weeks. Well it
has been 80 days as of today. My eye lid did open back up again but I still
have double vision. It is starting to get better but I think it will be
another three months before it gets back to normal at least I HOPE it will. I
will be devastated if it stays this way for the rest of my life. Last year I
came down with Bell’s palsy. My whole right side of my face was paralyzed.
Nobody can tell me why this keeps happening to me.
The nurses were nice to me while I was in the
hospital but they had my legs wrapped in some kind of contraption that inflates
with air and then deflates again. It kept doing that the whole 2 days I was in
there. It was hard to sleep with that going all the time. I had a heart attack
in 1995 so they didn’t want me to get any blood clots in my legs. I hated that
feeling of my legs being squeezed constantly. They also had wires hooked up to
my chest to monitor my heart. Since I have Sleep Apnea, I have to be hooked up
at night with a BiPap machine so I don’t stop breathing while I am sleeping.
The nurses kept me in diapers and changed me the whole time I was in the
hospital. I have been incontinent ever since the VA cut away some of the muscle
around my bladder opening back in 1985.
I was having leaking problems so they said they could fix that. Well they didn’t.
Then they told me that I had Multiple Sclerosis.
Anyway the doctors at the hospital wanted me
to stay longer but I wanted to go back to my apartment. They told me they could
have a medical vehicle drive me back to my apartment and they told me how much
it would cost. “Holy Cow,” I said, “I have my car in the parking lot. They
couldn’t believe I drove myself to the hospital. They weren’t going to let me
drive myself back home. I argued and told them that the eye doctor taped up the
right lenses of my glasses so I have a single image now. I finally convinced
them to let me out of there. When I got the bill some weeks later they had
charged Medicare $21,800 for the 2 days I was in the hospital. My potion was
around $475 but I filed for financial assistance. But there are still a lot of
doctor bills that I still have to pay. Can you imagine how much it would have been
if they kept me in the hospital.