In my previous installment I talked about going to a Christmas ceremony on December 23 but there were other things that happened that day that we ought to cover. I had a bit of a rough night so I tried to nap as much as I could in the morning. I spent some time finishing up the second installment of my blog about being in the ICU. Here was my early morning Facebook post. [12/23/2016 7:16 AM ]

I’m not sure whether it was by email or by a Facebook post that I got some amazing news. The FDA had approved a drug called Spinraza for the treatment of Spinal Muscular Atrophy which is the genetic neuromuscular disease that I have. SMA comes in about four different varieties. I have type 2 which is very early onset but only weakens you very gradually over your lifetime. Living into your 60s like I had was not unheard of but I was probably pushing the limits. However the more severe type 1 weakens the children very severely at birth and they are fortunate if they managed to live more than two years. In a clinical trial, this drug was so effective in not only stopping the disease may in many cases increasing the strength of patients, that they stopped giving the placebo to part of the participants. Given that this was a seriously fatal disease and they had already seen positive results, it would’ve been immoral to deny the treatment to the other participants.

Although the clinical trials only involved the extreme type 1 infants, the FDA had taken the unusual step of approving it for all varieties of SMA and all ages of patients. This was a treatment and not a really cure. Early results showed it to be effective in only about 40% of the patients. Later that number increased to around 50%. I had known for years that if they ever did come up with a treatment, it wasn’t what to do me any good. Over 60 years of the disease had done damage that cannot be reversed. For a variety of reasons I won’t go into here, I’ve not pursued the treatment. The major reason is that is unproven for older type 2 patients at highly unlikely to do me any good. The side effects of the treatment are not well known. It involves a spinal injection and with my severe scoliosis that would be either dangerous or impossible.

Still it was an amazing piece of news and a wonderful Christmas present. I put together the following blog item telling a long story about my relationship with SMA and a funny story about one of my former employers who was a geneticist who is a bit of an ass.

For Christmas Eve I expected it to be an uneventful day. Dad was going to come and we were going to watch the Colts game. I had told Carol not to bring her grandkids to the hospital to see me because I knew they would be bored and rowdy. I had decided to take it easy and not get into the wheelchair today. Here was my early morning Facebook post.
[12/24/2016 9:45 AM ]

Fortunately nobody listened to me when I said don’t come and don’t bring the kids. Carol showed up with her daughter Alaina and grandkids Leighton and Keeleigh. Carol brought me a Christmas present that I have asked for. It kind of started out as a joke but actually it turned out to be a good idea for present. I had said “What do you get a guy for Christmas who has a trach? Of course the answer is scarves!” She got me a Colts and a Pacers scarf. There was a promise eventually we would get one for the Indy Fuel hockey team which we did eventually get. Here’s the live Facebook video of their visit at 2:13 PM.

Alaina and her kids did not stay long because as I predicted, they got a little bit rowdy. To my surprise, before Carol and the kids left, Karen and her boy Cole showed up for a visit as well. Here is the Facebook live video from 3:14 PM

My nephew Cole is a huge Chicago Cubs fan. When the Cubs won the World Series I built a special electronic hat for him. It has a strip of NeoPixels across the brim as well as a group of pixels underneath a 3D printed “C” for Cubs in the front. It runs off of an Adafruit Feather 32u4 BLE with a LiPo battery. You can control the pattern of lights using an app on your phone or tablet. Dad had brought it and left it in the car just in case we happen to see them. Unfortunately I could not demonstrate it because we ran down the battery playing with it. Here’s a video demonstration that I gave several weeks earlier on the Adafruit “Show-And-Tell”. My segment starts at about 5:35 into the video.

It turned out that the Colts lost their game and were eliminated from the possibility of making the playoffs. I spent the rest of the day working on a blog post about my Christmas card. If I wasn’t going to be able to mail out the Christmas cards, at least I could write about it and share the image with everyone on Facebook. I took time out to call my friend Judy and wish her Merry Christmas. Here was my final Facebook post of the day.
[12/24/2016 8:12 PM ]

Christmas morning I put the final touches on my blog about my Christmas card. Usually I make a CGI rendered image using POV-Ray rendering software but this year for a change I took one of my old CGI designs, 3D printed it, and took a photo of it. Here is a blog post from my graphics blog with the details.

I connected with my sister Carol via Skype and got to watch her kids and grandkids open Christmas presents that morning. I had hoped to do the same with Karen but we never were able to get together on that. I had a surprise visit from my friend Judy and from Fr. Paul. I had no idea they were coming so it was fun to spend time with them. I spent the rest of the day working on another installment of my blog about my time in the ICU. My only Facebook post other than the blog posts was the following note.
[12/25/2016 5:00 PM ]

In the end it was a much better Christmas than I expected it to be. I got to see all of the family that I usually see on Christmas plus visit from friends that I did not expect.

Because it was the holidays, they were still very shortstaffed. With Christmas falling on Sunday, people were considering Monday the holiday. Even the cafeteria downstairs was shut down. I was able to get up in my chair for over five hours. I got a visit from my friends Stu and Pat Byram which was fun.

While I was up in my chair, my throat got quite dry and my lungs got a bit congested. Dad was supposed to be learning how to do a trach suctioning but I had been doing so well that I didn’t really need one. He had done a couple of practices when there was nothing in my lungs to suck out. So when I got gunked up that day, Dad did his very first trach suctioning under “real world” circumstances where I really needed it. We did okay even though it maybe wasn’t the best one I ever had.

I had a talk with the nurse practitioner about taking me off some of the medication that they had put me on. I don’t recall what sort of extra meds I had been on but I didn’t really think I needed them anymore. We talked it over and she cleared it with the doctor and we cut me back to just my usual medication.

One of the meds I had been on for many years was Flomax which is supposed to help with prostate issues and to help you pee better. The warnings on that drug said do not crush it or chew it. It is a capsule that is only about half full of some sort of gritty powder. For months (perhaps years) I had been taking it by mouth and letting the capsule partially dissolve until I could smash it flat and swallow it. Many times the contents would come out into my mouth. Fortunately it did not taste bad so I had no trouble taking it by mouth. However under my new circumstances I wasn’t taking anything by mouth except plain water. So they had discontinued the Flomax and put me on something similar that was safe to grind up and put through the G-tube. With this exception everything else on my meds were back to normal. It turns out that substitute prostate medicine has continued to work well to this day. I’m not had a urinary infection in two years.

I managed to write another blog post about being in the ICU. I was really looking forward to Tuesday because that was the day that the respiratory therapist was going to bring in my new ventilator and to train my dad and Carol how to use it. Dad would then stay overnight Tuesday night to prove to everyone that he was capable of taking care of me. It was a ridiculous requirement but it was the only way they were going to let me out of the place. Theoretically I could be going home by Wednesday the 28th. Here are the two Facebook posts I made that day. [12/26/2016 6:58 AM ] [12/26/2016 6:14 PM ]

The next installment in this series is a couple of blog posts away. Click here to read “Training Day — Holiday Hospital Part 9“