Hospital updates (man I hate doing these)

This week had two hospital-related incidents - one was not too surprising and the other was me.

Grandkid Riley started having breathing issues on Wednesday and ended up in the hospital for two nights. He responded well to treatments and is doing fine now. I suspect this is in large part due to the "bucket of 400 things" I brought him on Thursday.

It was filled with craft things like pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, beads, puffy balls, and most interesting to Riley, two bottles of glitter paint and a bottle of white glue. The nurses smiled the smile of those who know this can't go well. In any case, I suspect they will be finding bits and pieces from that bucket in that room for the next few weeks.

(For those keeping track, this was his first hospital stay since last November, which is pretty good for him. Even once a year is still way too often though.)

And now about me.

About ten days ago I hurt my left side playing cricket during lunch at work. (Note that this is not even vaguely proper cricket. It's generally three of us on the tennis court taking turns smacking a ball.) I was trying to get Mit (not his real name) out. He is really good at this game, and opportunities to get him out don't come up very often. I ended up falling in sort of slow motion during the effort (which failed) and felt a bit of a "muscle strain" in my left rib cage. It wasn't a big deal and I finished the game, took some ibuprofen, and didn't think much about it.

The pain did not bother me during the next day's hike (at least not as much as the poison oak and tick did), and by the middle of the following week, it was healing nicely and all but forgotten. Until Friday night, when I tweaked it trying to get out of the Race Car. Again, ibuprofen worked fine at managing the pain and yesterday's walk was pretty much pain free.

After the walk I was harmlessly sitting on the couch, writing up a blog post, when all of the sudden I got a sharp pain in my left shoulder, well above the "muscle strain" area. I took some ibuprofen but that didn't seem to help. So I ended up taking one of Mrs Notthat's leftover vicodins, which helped a lot and allowed me to sleep (sort of).

Early this morning I could feel the pain coming back and got up to take another vicodin. But the pain was different, and was much worse. There was no comfortable position I could get in and it was extremely painful to breathe. I was now ready to say "uncle" and took Mrs Notthat up on her offer to drive me to the ER.

At the ER they gave me a shot of something, took X-Rays, and decided that I had cracked a rib ten days ago, and getting out of the Race Car probably aggravated its healing process. There is nothing they can really do about it though; just prescribe pain medications and tell me to take it easy(ish) while it heals.

So for today I am living on vicodins. Tomorrow I can hopefully switch back to ibuprofens. I'll be skipping cricket this week, and next Saturday does not include a long hike in its plans, so hopefully all will heal well and I won't have any more incidents like this morning.

And to Mrs Notthat - a HUGE thanks for dealing with all this so early on a morning you should have been able to sleep in a bit. You were awesome!

That's it - move along...