CN: medical stuff and mention of bodily fluids.

It’s been a rough summer.

I don’t think it’s been easy for anyone, of course. Deep into the second year of the pandemic, with guidance changing daily and over 600k people dead in the US alone, it would be odd for anyone to be completely okay.

But we were doing reasonably well, all things considered. We had our routines and we’d set up our lives so that we really came into contact with very few people. Until June.

One Saturday in June, as we were eating breakfast, Catharine put her hand on her chest and said she felt weird. We thought the pulse oximeter was broken, because her O2 sats were in the 70s and her heart rate was really, really high. But no, we tested it on me, and it was fine, so we called 911.

Long story short, she spent five days in the hospital being treated for a pulmonary embolism and the attendant consequences thereof. When you’re diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism, you get put on IV blood thinners, and they work really, really well.

Something you may or may not know about Catharine is that she’s fat. Everyone at the hospital was lovely, and they had a bariatric bed for her, but what was not lovely was the design of the bed, which, because she’s apparently much more mobile than most people her size in the hospital, meant that every time she got into or out of bed, she basically put a ton of pressure on the back of one of her thighs. She left bruised more badly than I’ve ever seen anyone bruised.

Because we have excellent timing, she went home just in time to be at home for the infamous heat dome.

Like most people in Portland, we don’t have air conditioning because we almost never need it. It usually cools off into the 50s or 60s overnight, so no matter how hot it gets during the day, if we close the windows and blinds during the day and open the windows overnight and maybe strategically stick a box fan into a window, the house cools off just fine.

Well, the heat dome had sequential days hitting 108, 112, and 115, and it wasn’t even always getting down into the 70s overnight. There was no cooling. I got my MacGyver on, and I managed to keep the house in the low 90s, but that was still unpleasant in the extreme.

And then, the day after it broke, we realized Catharine had developed cellulitis in the same spot she’d had it six years ago. Back to the hospital, which was so overrun from the heat dome that, while she was technically admitted, never moved her out of the ED. Hard core antibiotics, but that bruise I mentioned? By this point, it had turned into a hematoma, a 7cm diameter ball of pissed off whatever. A surgeon took a look and decided not to drain it at that point, and we were told it would absorb. (Luckily we figured out how to remove the piece of the bed that had hurt her to begin with, so we didn’t compound the trauma.)

Back home. Now, because of the pulmonary embolism and the need to get blood thinners into the right concentration — which concentration is messed up by antibiotics, it turns out — we had nurses coming to the house three times a week to check her INR. This was extremely helpful because they were also able to check on that hematoma, which started bleeding. We thought, okay, great! It’s draining!

Now, you have to understand: the hematoma is essentially in her inner thigh. Imagine, if you will, trying to bandage someone’s inner thigh when it’s bleeding pretty freely especially when they stand up and walk. I spent a lot of time wiping blood droplets up off the floor between the bedroom and the bathroom because no matter how we did the bandages, they’d come right off as soon as she walked.

Eventually, though, the draining got to the point where there was a literal hole in her leg, and the visiting nurse stuck a swab in to check the depth. 11cm. (At the time, that was the grossest thing I had ever willingly witnessed.) Catharine’s PCP sent her back to the hospital.

This time she was in for eight days while they surgically opened and drained the hematoma and then packed the wound. The first time the nurse pulled the gauze out to change it, it was like a magic trick, when the scarves just keep coming and coming and coming. The surgeon cheerfully shining a pen light into the inside of her leg and telling me to come look officially took over as the grossest thing I had ever willingly witnessed.

They finally put her on a wound vac, which is this snazzy little system that creates a vacuum seal around the wound to keep anything bad from getting in and which drains any discharge that should be leaving. It’s super cool, but it means she’s attached to a machine 24/7, and it also means she can’t really do much lest she accidentally break the vacuum seal, which we did a bunch early on while we figured everything out.

So she’s on the road to recovery. We hope. But this road is a lot of work. I have to help her in and out of bed, even if it’s the middle of the night. Nurses come three times a week to change the wound vac dressings, and at this point I’m the expert in what works best for her, so unless it’s a nurse we’ve had many times, I need to be there. I’m the one who has to water the garden to keep it alive through various heat waves, I deal with litterboxes and feeding the cats, and I’m responsible for everything in the household including food, meds, trash, basic cleaning, and laundry. So much laundry. Oh, yeah, and do the job that pays for the insurance that keeps us out of the poorhouse with all of these medical things.

And we have no idea how long it’s going to take. One of the surgeons uttered the phrase “two to eight months” and that was not really want I wanted to hear.

It would be exhausting if we weren’t in a pandemic. But we are, and that’s added extra stress.

Obviously, we’ve seen a lot more people in the past two months than we had in the previous 16 months. Everyone has been masked, of course, but it’s still added risk. Given the Delta surge, if she needed to go back to the hospital for some reason, I don’t know if there would be room. And we were already exhausted because of the pandemic.

I’m scraping the bottom of the energetic barrel here.

We watched Nemo again the other day, and we not infrequently sing Dory’s swimming song. Except, at times like this, I sing, “just keep coping, just keep coping” and I do. I keep coping. But there’s a cost, and I never know when the bill will come due, so I’m trying to build in as much rest and recovery for myself as I can, but it’s not enough. It’s not enough, but it’s all I have.

We get groceries delivered. We get almost everything delivered. We’re paying a friend who is a personal care assistant to come help bathe Catharine. All of this is a great privilege, and things would be immeasurably worse if we couldn’t do these things, but it doesn’t make it easy. Just possible. Kinda.

I don’t know how to end this, because saying “I’m exhausted” feels inadequate to the bone-deep fatigue I’ve got going on. But that’s also all I have.

It’s been a rough summer. I’m exhausted. I’m hoping autumn brings us some ease.