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Three little pops lead to hospital ICU

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I awoke not quite feeling myself.

As I told you a few weeks back, I fell while cleaning my pool. That was on April 4. I knew I had injured myself but at first it didn’t seem too serious.

I had a purple pinkie finger and there was some discomfort in my left side ribs. Our grandson, Hunter, was visiting from New Jersey, and we wanted to show him a good time while he was here.

The pain increased each day. As I told you in an earlier column, I then got an appointment at the Mayo Clinic. An x-ray showed I had a fractured rib on my left side.

That night I started experiencing severe muscle cramps along the bottom of my rib cage in the front and in my upper back. I talked with my nurse, who in turn, consulted with the doctor I had seen. She prescribed some muscle relaxer pills, which worked quite well to stop the painful cramping.

I started to feel like myself again. In fact, I felt so much better, that I went ahead and kept my regular turn at cooking at The Club. For those of you who don’t know about the Club, it is a social club for men.

There are 10 cook teams that prepare the Monday night dinners. I am one of the cook captains. There are as many as 16 guys on a team. I had eight available on this particular Monday night. There were 102 members and guests signed up for dinner.

At some point during the preparation of the dinner, I reached up to pull a pot down from an upper shelf. As I pulled the pot I remember hearing three popping sounds in my back. I didn’t think much of it at the time, because there was no extreme pain.

But that one simple move resulted in a whole lot of new problems for me.

The next morning I woke up with a large swollen spot on my back.

Diane woke up and asked me what was wrong?

“I just feel really tired,” I replied.

As I looked at her she started looking like a pixilated photo with each square in either purple or lime green.

I told her that and she said, “We’re going to the emergency at the hospital!”

Arriving at Mayo Clinic Hospital, they quickly took me inside and I had hypotension. My blood pressure was 71/41.

After some further examination, they admitted me into the Intensive Care Unit where I remained for four days.

Now, ICU is not a place to get some rest.

There are monitors running in your room.

There are bells going off and announcements, people coming in and taking your temperature and blood pressure regularly. It’s a busy place to say the least.

I was transferred to a regular room on Friday and I got out on Saturday.

The hospital staff was very friendly and accommodating.

The giant lump on my back turned out to be a large hematoma filled with blood from three dislocated ribs that could have occurred when I pulled down the pot.

I’m still taking it easy and I am in the office only a limited time each day until these ribs are completely healed.

As for my blood pressure, it is getting under control with medication. I am now averaging 109/ 64 and my heart rate is averaging 62.

Low blood pressure is a symptom of advanced Parkinson’s, I learned.

It also could be the reason for my falls over the past four years.