610 Miles in One Day!

Whew.  What a long day yesterday was.  Once Tony said that he was getting the thumbs up to come home yesterday, I couldn’t wait to wake up and go get him.  I got up at 5:45, jumped in the shower and I was on my way by 6:10.  I don’t like to eat anything too heavy in the morning when I drive somewhere for some reason.  I also don’t drink coffee, which I totally love, but um, let’s just say it gets things moving in the morning in the bathroom department and I didn’t want to have to stop an hour after I left to go poop.  TMI – I know!

We still use our old school GPS – Tony used to travel quite a bit up in Wisconsin, and I think I got this for him in 2006?  We haven’t done any of the updates on it, but for the most part it works just fine.

I parked and got to Tony’s room by 11:30 – not too bad!  I found his nurse and told her I was here and she was going to page the cardiologist to let her know I was there.  Basically Tony has a leaky mitral valve, which is causing most of his problems.  They noticed during a test that when his blood pressure was low, the leaking almost completely stopped.  They never did the heart biopsy because it was too high risk, and if they can avoid doing any kind of surgery, they are all for it.  So are going to control his fluids and blood pressure and see if that alone can manage the leaking.  I have to go and buy a blood pressure cuff because we need to weigh him and take his blood pressure every day.  We will report to the Mayo Clinic with those numbers every two weeks, and they will adjust his medications accordingly. 

The fact that we may be able to control the situation remotely but still work with Mayo is amazing.  After the doctor left, we had a Nurse Practitioner come in – Hey Aimee – what’s the difference between a Nurse Practitioner and an R.D.?  We had a NP come by every time with the doctor.   She went over everything, but we still had to go to the Mayo to meet with the cardiology liaison that we will be working with directly.   All I know was that Tony was ready to get the hockey puck out of there!

As I was packing up, I saw the gift bag for the headphones I had sent up from the gift shop.  Heather, I thought you’d get a kick out of the Doug Benson reference!

We were finally on the road by about 2:40 to head back.  Tony jokingly asked if I wanted him to drive.  Ha!  He was so tired, I’d just look over and he’d have his eyes closed.  Around 4:30 I was getting hangry.  I ended up eating one of my granola bars around 10:30.   We ended up stopping at Hardee’s.  We don’t have Hardee’s around us.  Tony just wanted a plain cheeseburger.  I ended up getting the 3 piece chicken fingers – I thought that would be easiest to eat while I was driving, and we split a small fry.  When I checked the nutrition on that, I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t too bad – well, except for the sodium which was 1200 mg!  But my 3 tenders and 1/2 a bag of small fries came in at 490 calories, 24 fat, 5 fiber, 43 carbs, and 28 protein.  I never ended up using the buffalo dipping sauce – I thought it would be too messy.  I am laughing at this picture I took off of google “now available in Lahore & Islamabad.”  I’ve never even heard of those places!  (Geography has never been a strong skill of mine!)

Mayo had sent our prescriptions to our local Walgreen’s, but one of the medications is sometimes not in stock, and he had to take that medication last night before we went to bed.  I called around 3:30 when we were driving home and they assured me that they had everything in stock and asked what time we’d be picking it up.  She said they were really busy, and when I said 8:00, she said “oh good – no problem!”

But I still ended up waiting about 25 minutes for the meds.  I left Tony in the car and had to come out and tell him that I was still waiting for them – so close to home but not close enough!  We finally pulled into the drive at 8:45.  I got the car unpacked, and at 9:00 I poured myself a tall glass of wine.  After driving 610 miles round trip for 10.5 hours, I think I earned a glass of wine.

It felt like I was asleep for 5 minutes last night!  I did sleep in until 7:15 this morning, which is 45 minutes later than usual, so that helped.  I have 15 minutes to get ready for work – no problem!

I hope to catch up on my blog reading and comments this weekend – thank you for your continued support these last few weeks – it means more to me than you’ll ever know! 

And here is my shameless plug to vote for my recipe contest – have a great Friday!