Back on My Feet Again...

Thu, Apr  24, 2008 - By Kikkan Randall

Yippee, I'm out of the hospital! After spending the last six days couped up in a hospital bed, tethered to all sorts of wires and tubes, it feels great to be standing free on my own two feet. Let me recap what happened over the past week...

Last Tuesday morning, I checked back in to Providence hospital after finding out that the blood clot in my left leg had reformed. This time around, the doctors used a different technique to clear out the clot. A special catheter, which releases the clot-busting drug like a sprinkler while simultaneously emitting ultrasonic rays, was placed in the popliteal vein behind my knee and threaded up to the top of my iliofemoral vein (upper pelvic area). Dr. Inamputti (an Interventional Radiologist) also did some work with angioplasty balloons to try and widen narrowed parts of the vein. I was semi-conscious through the process. After a couple hours, I was taken up to the CVIU (Cardio Vascular Intervention Unit) for around the clock monitoring, attached to all sorts of machines monitoring the ultrasonic catheter, IV fluids, heart rate, blood pressure, etc. For most of the day I slept. The first night I had severe spasms in my left leg that were quite painful. The nurse gave me morphine for the pain and apparently I was quite out of it for the next several hours, speaking gibberish and blaming everything on "the Canadians."

Read the complete story in Kikkan's blog at http://www.kikkan.com/blood_clot2.html