Things were finally taking an upturn. After weeks tethered to the bed by various pumps, all the assistive devices came out and he only had one more night to spend in bed before he would finally be able to get up and start moving and start with cardiac rehab and some physical therapy. I stayed with him as he was moved out of the ICU back to the telemetry unit, got him settled, helped with his bed bath and about 10 pm, headed home to get some sleep myself and I wrote this quick update.

Tommy update: Things have been going the right direction the last few days. He is out of the ICU setting and back in the CCU which is much more conducive to visitors. Both of the external pumps have been removed and he has so far remained stable so he can start getting out of bed for the first time in nearly a month tomorrow. Next stage is seeing how well his heart can meet the demands of his body and working on reducing the IV medications that have been stabilizing him.

He continues to encourage visitors as he is likely to be hospitalized for some days yet as he begins a long rehab process.

Things should get easier for me now that he is no longer tethered to the bed.

If you’d like to bring a meal to share with him, drop me a line.

I don’t remember what the last things were we said to each other. I know I got his breakfast order for the next morning and I remember that he was grumpy that he had to spend one more night flat on his back. The pumps were out but he had holes from them in a major leg artery that had to be allowed to clot off to keep from massive internal bleeding. His IVs kept running but they turned off the heparin for 24 hours per protocol.

I was dog tired and pretty much collapsed once I got home and got the usual chores done. The phone woke me up sometime after 2 in the morning.

Five days later and we had gotten into a routine. Tommy slowly improved. I started to plan out a life for us after he came home, trying to figure out what his needs would be and how we would pay for them. In the meantime, there were his spirits to be kept up, meals to be eaten, friends to visit…

Tommy Update – He remains in the CICU with both external pumps in place. The cardiologists are working to optimize his physiology in preparation for removing at least one later this week. He continues to feel OK and be awake and alert and welcomes adult visitors. Just get hold of me and let me know when you would like to come. Daytime visits 9-6 or evening after 8:30 (but he tends to go to sleep early).

What do we need? He still prefers outside food. If you would like to bring and share a meal, let me know and I can schedule that. We both need to remain connected to our lives so feel free to call/text/message us. He may not always answer depending on how he’s feeling but he does listen to/read them.

For the moment, our home life remains in abeyance but I am pretty much keeping up with what needs to be done. Except the garden. If anyone has nothing better to do and wants to come weed…

I will need to go back to work starting May 7th. If he’s still hospitalized, I may need some people to spend time with him while I am at work. I don’t know if we’ll be in that position or not.

Several people did come and help with the weeding. I was most grateful. I have no excuse now other than laziness.

The outpouring of concern that followed my initial post about Tommy and his health led me to start some more routine dialogue with everyone. This was my update from two days later.

Tommy update: He is in the CICU so they can keep a sharp eye on him. He has been stable with some improvement over the last day or so. He feels OK, other than being weak, and is very tired of being confined to bed. If he continues to do well, the plan is to get the pumps that assist his heart out of his system so he can start getting up and that’s what we’re focusing on now.

What can you do to help? This is a situation where thoughts and prayers are absolutely appropriate as what he needs for healing requires skilled cardiologists.and that’s beyond most of us.

He’s requiring blood products so if you’re a donor, go make a donation in his honor and replenish the system.

He hates the hospital food, so I’m bringing in a lot for him. If you would like to do that, message me as he does have some limitations in diet.

Visitors are fine, but again, message me as there are some restrictions on visiting hours and the CICU is not conducive to a lot of folk at once.

There may have been limitations on diet, but Tommy was having none of that. I spent a good portion of my time during his bed confinement running around to various restaurants to meet his whims for take out. There was nothing wrong with his appetite or his foodie instincts. And woe be unto me if I got any of the order wrong…

Our saga began, unknown to us, on the day of the annual Opera Gala in March of this past year. Tommy, as company manager, was intimately involved with a hundred myriad details getting everything ready and had left the house early that morning. I was at work per usual. About 10:30 AM I got a call from him that he had crashed his car on I-65 and could I come get him as he didn’t have time for that. I hurried off to where he was to find his Prius in the ditch with a busted axle, a very large light pole uprooted, and Tommy not the least bit hurt talking to a very nice state patrolman. Tommy had no idea what had happened. He had been driving down the road and then he was in the ditch. (In hindsight, he probably had a mild cardiac syncope event but we didn’t suspect that). I got the insurance people on the phone, found him a rental SUV and off he went at a mad dash to finish his day. I met him down at the ballroom in our glad rags and the party went off without a hitch due to his usual meticulous planning.

The next few weeks, were the usual production period blur. I was in the cast of Romeo and Juliette and he was busy with dozens of off stage tasks. He also came up with several score of wigs for a Red Mountain Theater showcase in there somewhere. By the time the opera was over, we were both tired. We closed on Sunday. He took Monday off and stayed in bed feeling fatigued, not unusual for him after a busy time. On Tuesday, he felt worse and his legs were starting to swell alarmingly. On Wednesday, he was worse still and I insisted he head for the ED. (He usually refused to listen to me about health issues. After all, what did I know about such things? I was only a doctor and he was a nurse and therefore much more knowledgeable as he saw it). There, he was found to be in fulminant congestive heart failure due to previously unsuspected coronary artery disease. He was admitted to the cardiac service while people tried to figure out what to do. He was admitted on March 28th. It took the cardiologists nearly two weeks to decide that his best option was cardiac stents to open his blocked vessels and, just after his birthday on April 10th, he finally went to the cath lab and had seven stents placed in an eleven hour procedure. His heart needed rest and he was placed on bilateral assist pumps intravenously to do some of the work of his heart.

Tommy was always very guarded with personal information so while our close friends and families knew what was up, we hadn’t posted anything specific on Facebook or elsewhere. He finally decided the time was right on April 17th when he was through his surgery and slowly getting better in the ICU. This was my entry:

Those of you who know us know that Tommy is a very private individual while I am much more the let it all hang out there type. Because of this, I have waited until he felt it was time to post about what has been going on with us the last few weeks.

Three weeks ago, just after Romeo and Juliette closed, Tommy developed sudden onset shortness of breath and body swelling. In the emergency room, they found that he had serious, and previously unknown cardiac disease and was in heart failure. Since that time, he has been hospitalized at UAB in the CCU. I won’t bore you all with all of the dramas and complications of the last few weeks but will say that a number of very good cardiologists have found a route out of the hospital for him. The first major step occurred yesterday when he was given seven stents in his heart and a temporary assistive pump.

He is currently confined to bed due to the pump, but is awake and alert and doesn’t feel that bad, just weak. It’s been a long journey but will continue for quite some time. We’re taking it day by day.

We don’t have any immediate needs. He is well cared for at the hospital. I am home to sleep, and take care of the house and cats, but spend as much time with him as I can. My job has been very understanding about some extended and unplanned time off. This all may change as things progress.

I will try to keep people updated as we navigate this unexpected detour from life. Our usual activities are in abeyance. If you are expecting something from us in the near future, I apologize but we’re unlikely to be able to meet that obligation at this time.

If you have questions, feel free to call, text, email or message me. Tommy is not always up to communicating. .

I’m a good enough doctor to recognize how seriously ill he was, but my assumption was that he would recover enough to come home to a somewhat reduced life (which he was not going to like…) I was wrong.

Here’s some quick biographical details so if you’re new to me and my story, you won’t get too confused. I was raised in Seattle, Washington, the eldest child of three. My father was a professor of oceanography at the University of Washington and my mother taught various sciences at the local junior college. I grew up in the city proper, just east of the University in a neighborhood which was faculty ghetto at the time my parents moved in but which is far too expensive for that these days. I went to a well regarded prep school, Lakeside, for high school and then headed off to Stanford University for undergraduate (much to the chagrin of my mother who had gone to UC Berkeley). I returned back to Seattle for medical school, and then went back to California and UC Davis for residency, fellowship and my first faculty position in geriatric medicine.

I met Steve (Jon Steven Spivey), my first partner about six months after arriving in Sacramento, finally came out officially (to the surprise of absolutely no one) and we lived there together happily for nearly ten years. In the late 1990s, UC Davis had a melt down, the clinical geriatrics program was caught in the cross fire and I was suddenly out of a job. Ultimately, I took the position I currently hold at University of Alabama Birmingham and Steve and I moved cross country. Steve became ill with pulmonary fibrosis about a year after we arrived and I cared for him for another two years until his death. A year or so later, when I was toying with moving back to the west coast, I met Tommy (Louie Tommy Thompson Jr.) who became my second partner. Together we developed a life in Birmingham full of professional accomplishments and music and theater.

Tommy, who had never had the most robust health, developed serious heart disease suddenly in the spring of 2018, was hospitalized, and died suddenly and unexpectedly from his heart problems. We had fifteen years together, including four of legal marriage. I am adjusting to being alone again. At fifty six, I’m young enough for a third act but I’m too darned tired to train a new husband at this point. I’m going to content myself with my aging self, my aging cats, my aging patients, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham, and my theater peeps.

I am nursing a beast of a head cold and sitting here in bed trying to decide the best way to deal with all of my writings and musings from the last year. As all of you are aware, I lost Tommy, my life partner, unexpectedly this last April. This is the second time I’ve been widowed. My first partner, Steve, died in 2001. One of the things I learned in recovering from Steve’s death is that writing about my thoughts, memories and feelings helped me to process what had happened to me and so I began to write prolonged posts for Facebook after Tommy fell ill. It was a way for me to update friends and family, a way to sort out what was going on in my head, and a way for me to creatively cope with a cruel situation.

Another thing I learned from losing Steve was that travel is healing for me. This led to me taking some time off work and road tripping across the country and back. It has also led to me starting to book a number of exotic trips so I can start working my way through my life list of things I want to see before I die. As I am currently traveling alone, I have no one to debrief with at dinner about the day and what I have seen and what my impressions are so some of my writings have taken the form of public travelogue so that others can comment and fill in the gap.

When I took stock of what I have been writing at the first of the year, I realized I had written nearly 100 essays of varying lengths. They run the gamut from discussions of the ephemera of my usual day to thoughts on culture and politics to descriptions of places I have wandered off to stories of my past. There’s enough material there to make something interesting. I don’t know yet if it’s memoir or book or performance piece. The first thing it is is this blog, a place I can put them all, start categorizing, and let anyone who is interested start getting a sense of who I am and how I manage to cope with pain and loss.

The plan is to put all of the pieces I have written so far here in chronological order. I’ll do a little editing and clean them up some as I reread them. I tend to write very quickly in a stream of consciousness style so when I go back and look, at times I cringe and find I have to change things somewhat to make me sound less stupid. Once they are in order, I’ll open this up to inquisitive eyes and suggestions for what else this material might become.

So buckle up, here we go….   and don’t forget your towel.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton