Thursday, December 15 was my first full day at Seton Specialty Hospital. I was visited by a long list of therapists. I’ve never had any physical or occupational therapy of any kind throughout my life. You may recall in my ICU story a very tense and scary visit from a group of physical therapists who attempted to evaluate me even though I couldn’t talk because I was on a ventilator. Fortunately that incident turned out okay because they respected my wishes not to be manipulated physically by them. This was unlike some of the nurses I encountered in the ICU.

Apparently therapy is big business in a long-term specialty hospital like this. The goal is to get people stronger, faster, better and that takes therapy. I was visited by a physical therapist, occupational therapist, a skin specialist who inspected me for bedsores, and a speech therapist who is there to evaluate my swallowing difficulties. We made plans with the physical therapist to try to get me up in my wheelchair as early as the next day. The skin nurses were as usual very impressed at the lack of any sort of skin sores or lesions. Throughout my entire two-week visit in this hospital I continued to have to argue to convince them that lying flat on my back and not turning on my side very much if at all was the best thing for the condition of my skin. Whenever they argued back at me I would invite them to look at my skin and ask them if my ideas about how to protect my skin were so bad, how come my skin looks so good. I had no trouble convincing the occupational therapists that I really didn’t need anything from them.

The speech therapist wasn’t there to work on my speech. Now that I was off the vent and had my voice back there was nothing wrong with that. But she was there to evaluate my swallowing difficulties. After my G-tube procedure in May 2016 I had continued to drink Coke and to take oral medication by mouth. But there was always a risk of aspirating something. She had me try swallowing ice chips and water and of course concluded my ability to swallow was awful. The conclusion was all of my medication would continue to be ground up, mixed with water, and put in to the G-tube. I don’t recall if it was at this point or another visit later on by the speech therapist that they discussed something called “Frazier Water Protocol”. It’s the idea that if you have difficulty swallowing and are at risk of aspirating fluid, that it’s not only okay to drink plain water but it’s a good idea. The theory is if you have good oral care and keep your mouth clean and you are drinking plain water, even if you would accidentally aspirate something it would just be plain water and would not be harmful. Or at least not as harmful as aspirating food or other kinds of liquid such as milk, soda etc.

Keeping a clean mouth is a big part of that. The nurses would swab my mouth with a sponge swab soaked in mouthwash a couple of times a day. Sometimes it was with a small brush that wasn’t really like a toothbrush but they did brush your teeth and mouth with it. The respiratory therapist would also do some sort of swabbing twice a day so I was actually getting mouth care four times a day.

Speaking of respiratory therapists, they would do a catheter suction of my trach as needed. They would give me albuterol breathing treatments every six hours around the clock (yes in the middle of the night). Additionally there is a piece of gauze with a slit in it that slides around my trach. That would get changed twice a day. The strap around my neck that holds in the trach would get changed every other day.

When I wasn’t on the ventilator (which was all day long) they would place a sort of cup-shaped clear plastic device over the opening of the trach that was held in place by a strap around my neck. It’s called the trach mask. It was connected by hose to a humidifier and about 6 litres per minute of oxygen. Normally when you breathe through your mouth or through your nose, the air is both heated and moisturized by your mouth or nasal passages. However when breathing through a trach, the air goes directly into your windpipe and into your lungs. So you need some way to get heat and humidity to keep your lungs from drying out. At times it was turned up to 10 liters which made it very noisy. If there was a low point in the hose, then condensation would collect and it would start making a terrible rattling noise. There was a bag in the circuit that you could tip the hose the right way and would dump the condensation into a collection bag. Most of the time just to cut down on the noise I would have people turn it down a little bit.

Among the other new people I met was a new case manager a woman named Michelle. It became apparent that any progress towards getting my ventilator at home were probably rolled back to the beginning. The transition between St. Vincent’s case manager and this new one did not go well. This entire process of getting the ventilator was predicted to take 2 weeks and I felt like we’ve wasted three or four days already.

Here is my only Facebook post for the 15th.

Sparse Amenities

The rooms in Seton Specialty Hospital are much smaller than those in the regular St. Vincent Hospital. Most of St. Vincent’s rooms were originally 2 bed rooms that had been converted into a single bed room. So they were quite spacious. The ICU rooms also have a good amount of space because often you have lots of IVs, ventilators etc. and they need room to work on you in critical situations. So this room felt quite cramped compared to what I had been used to.

The cable TV system had a good mix of basic cable channels such as ESPN, news channels, sci-fi etc. of course along with the local channels. It was an analog cable system unlike the digital IP-based system used in St. Vincent. Fortunately that meant there were no spurious pop-up messages interrupting my viewing. Of course it always takes a couple of days to figure out where your favorite channels are. The remote is only channel up and channel down so you can’t just jump to a particular channel. You have to scroll through all of them and invariably you always end up searching the wrong direction and having to go all the way around and back again to get what you want to see.

The shape of the room was really strange. There was sort of a little alcove off in one corner that had a window so you can see outdoors. But the alcove was so small you could hardly get a wheelchair in there. There was sort of a shelf table built into the wall and we kept my laptop and iPhone sitting there when I wasn’t using it. There was an electrical outlet nearby so I can keep everything charged up. There were two chairs in the room for visitors. One was a reclining chair for a patient to sit in when they were up and about and the other was just a regular chair. Somewhere along the way we lost the recliner. If I had multiple visitors we had to scrounge up an extra chair for them to sit in.

Telepresence

While in the ICU I had used mostly my iPhone for Internet access to things like Facebook and email as well as text messages occasionally. But now that I could talk again, we set up my laptop computer on the bed tray. I used my usual voice control software supplemented by my IR remote that helps with mouse control. It also gets me out of trouble whenever the voice control locks up which unfortunately is frequently. One of the problems with the IR remote is that I can’t use it and hold the nurse call button at the same time. That generally meant that I only used the laptop while dad was visiting and he could call the nurse for me if need be. The Wi-Fi here was apparently the same system used by regular St. Vincent because the special login screen was identical. I never had any trouble connecting to it and was able to watch streaming video just fine as well as to do some live streaming from my iPhone using the Wi-Fi.

One of the big challenges for me as the person addicted to TV is that while you’re in the hospital you risk having your DVR overflow. Bright House has a webpage that you are supposed to be able to login to access your DVR. You can’t watch what’s recorded but you can see what programs you have, what is scheduled, and you can access the program guide to schedule new programs. Unfortunately for some reason I couldn’t get it to work. I later discovered that there’s some sort of glitch that it doesn’t work when your DVR is above 90% full. I found an alternate way to access the DVR which I will describe in a minute. But once I got it cleaned out using this alternate method, suddenly the webpage access started working again.

We have 2 DVR’s in our house. One in the living room that records programs that dad watches alone or that he and I watch together. The other one is in my bedroom and it records stuff that I watch by myself. In my office which is about halfway between the living room and my bedroom, I have a TV that can connect to either DVR. We don’t really have traditional “whole house DVR”. I just sort of rigged things that way. There is a 15 foot HDMI cable that runs from the living room cable box into my office into an HDMI port. There’s also a coaxial cable that runs a longer distance from the office TV into my bedroom and connects to the bedroom DVR. By changing the input on that office TV I can switch between the two.

I also have web controlled TV remotes built on Arduino Yun IOT boards in the living room, office and my bedroom. I can call up a webpage from any device connected to my home Wi-Fi and have complete control of the TVs, cable boxes etc. You can’t access these web-based remote controls from outside my home Wi-Fi but I have a workaround for that. I used a remote access program called Team Viewer that lets me login to my home desktop in the office from anywhere else such as my laptop in the hospital. I then call up the TV remote webpages on my office computer remotely via Team Viewer and I can control both DVR’s and all three TVs.

So I had my dad take the WebCam off the top of my computer monitor and prop it up pointed at the office TV. I then logged in to the office computer using Team Viewer and looked at the office TV using the WebCam. I then used the browser-based TV remotes to switch back and forth between the living room DVR and bedroom DVR. I used the web-based remote in the living room and the bedroom to browse through the programs, erase a few of them to make room, and reschedule re-recording those programs later in the week. This is a process I do on a daily basis when I’m home. If I have a movie recorded and I’m running out of space, I do a search for when the movie is going to be on again later. I then schedule a re-recording and delete the copy I already have recorded. So this WebCam based, Team Viewer controlled access allowed me to do just that and it kept both of my DVR’s in reasonable shape. I did end up deleting a couple of programs that were not that important to me and that I could not re-record. Also there was a miscommunication with dad about managing the living room DVR and he deleted a couple of programs I would’ve liked to have kept. I tried using this method to watch a TV show that I had recorded but the quality of watching it over the WebCam and poor sound coming to the WebCam microphone made it not really worth the effort. As I will explain later, I used this remote login and WebCam access for other purposes as well.

Updated Users Manual

That first day I also took the opportunity to type up my handwritten “Users Manual Chris Young” that I had written while in the ICU. It was instructions on things like “Don’t touch my kneecaps because they dislocate easily”, “How I signal yes or no”, “How to use the message board for me to spell messages”, and “How to put the call button in my hand”. Additionally I made new versions of the keyboard chart that I have people point to so that I can spell out messages when I can’t use my iPhone and cannot talk while I’m on the ventilator at night. Eventually I made 2 charts: one of them I called the “Letter Board” and the other one I called the “Word Board”. The letter board was simply a traditional QWERTY keyboard layout with instructions on how to point at the rows and columns for me to type out messages. The word board had words and phrases that I would use frequently. It turns out that 95% of what I needed people to do while I was on the ventilator could be handled by the word board and the letter board which had been my only means of communication was now sort of a backup for special cases. Here are what the two communication boards look like. Note: you can click on the images for larger versions.

When I came up with my first draft of my instruction manual, I uploaded it along with the communications charts to my desktop at home using the file transfer features of Team Viewer. Dad would bring me the printed pages the next day. The document went through several revisions both the communication charts and the instruction manual. At one point I had a critical update I needed to make to one of the charts that I wanted to get right away. I don’t remember what it was I wanted to add but I didn’t want to wait for dad to bring it the next day. I knew that my friends Rich and Kathy Logan were coming to visit me and I asked Rich if he could print a copy and bring it with him. So I emailed it to him and he brought it when he visited.

I don’t really have early drafts of the documents but I’m going to include here the final version because that’s all I saved. There were a variety of updates over the first week or so of my stay at Seton Hospital. Here is the final draft of my users manual.

In addition to typing up my instruction manual and working on my communication charts I also worked on a document I called “calendar.doc”. It is just a sentence or two about what went on each day. That would later help me to prepare these blog posts. Because I’d only been in the ICU about a week and I did have some iCloud notes and Facebook posts to refresh my memory, I was able to re-create what it happened that first week. But going forward this little cheat sheet of what I did each day was going to be quite valuable for putting together the blogs. And speaking of blogs… I began the first draft of the first installment of my blog series “Pray That They Listen to the Man with No Voice“.

It had been a very busy first full day.