June Came With A Surprise

 

 

 

 

 

   Well June came with another surprise for me. On June 4^th 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 3^rd 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.