Where, you may be wondering, have I been for the last eight months?

Actually, I’ve been in Boston the whole time, so why no blog posts?

For those who don’t know the answer, here’s the Readers Digest condensed version. Like Gaul, it’s divided into three parts:

Part 1 (according to my wife Barbara and my medical records, since I personally have zero memory of it) is that I fell out of bed on July 8 and was taken to the ER at Beth Israel, where they determined that I was hypoxic and and that I had Legionnaire’s Disease as well as significant infections in my liver, kidneys, and lungs. This combo required eight days of dialysis, intubation, and a medically induced coma. Most significantly I had a TBI (traumatic brain injury). The doctors weren’t sure whether I would even last the night!

Obviously I did.

After a few days in the ICU they transferred me to a regular unit, released me from the coma, but kept me at Beth Israel.

I stayed in the hospital as an in-patient for 17 days, which I gather is unusual. This was mostly in a nice double room with lots of attention and medical care. I still was in bad shape both physically and cognitively. At least I knew my name but could barely talk. And I thought I knew where I was: I was simultaneously in Philadelphia and in Concord (New Hampshire). It never occurred to me that this was impossible. Actually, of course, I was in Beth Israel in Boston, but I didn’t know that at first. Slowly I regained memories and the ability to recognize my many visitors, even if I couldn’t converse much. (Thank you to all who visited.) Things kept getting better day by day, but the TBI wasn’t going anywhere…

And now for Part 2: After rapid improvement on all fronts, Beth Israel was ready to discharge me to rehab on July 25. (Barbara and I pushed successfully for moving me to Spaulding Rehab in Charlestown. I highly recommend it if you ever need rehab to get over surgery or medical trauma. Not only did they take even better care of me than the BI did, it also had a variety of amenities that I’m sure helped me: a beautiful view from the 7th floor, excellent food (!) with many choices, a gym, and of course a variety of PT/OT people, including a speech language pathologist who helped me with memory issues.)

And finally comes Part 3: Spaulding had to discharge me to home, where I could walk around with a cane and/or a walker. I resumed cooking almost immediately. I received regular home health care from the usual variety of specialties — first from Mass General Brigham and then from Fox. (That’s Fox Rehab, not Fox News. Fox News wouldn’t have helped at all.) One downside was it was almost impossible to find a physical terrorist — I mean therapist — to come to the house. The only one Fox could find (eventually) had to do it remotely. No surprise, it turned out that PT on iPads isn’t really satisfactory, though we tried it for a few weeks. So yesterday I started real face-to-face PT through my regular primary care people: their team contains a whole range of specialists, including PT. We’ll see how that goes…

Summary of the current state of things:

On the one hand, I still can’t drive, I tire easily, I have trouble walking up more than one flight of stairs at a time, I have trouble reaching up high, I can’t reach down low enough to pick something up off the floor, my memory is far from what it once was, I had to retire fully instead of enjoying the semi-retirement I had been in, and the NYT Sunday crossword takes me twice as long as it used to. But I can still complete it; just keep me away from Saturdays. On the other hand, in news since August 8, I can finally manage long-form writing (like this), I can and do read a lot, I no longer need to nap every afternoon, I can walk around the house without help (human or technological), and I can even walk down the block if I am using my cane.

The moral is: if you have to have a traumatic brain injury, have it in Boston.

Stay tuned…

Categories: Life, Technology