paulradcliffe.me archive
Tag: Hospital
June 14, 2020
Friendly Fire: How does an Auto-Immune Illness Happen?
I’ve written a lot now about my health journey this year, where a rare auto-immune disease almost killed me, crippled me, put my family through hell, and how I’ve spent over a year trying to get my life back together. This has been a frightening but motivating journey for me. Many questions have hounded me over these long, trying months: What happened? How did it happen? Why did it happen to me? How do I prevent it from happening again? How can I help my friends and family avoid similarly debilitating illnesses? I refuse to believe some diagnoses that I was just[…continue reading]
May 14, 2020
A Less Intensive Recovery Period
As I’m writing this post, the world is in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic. At this time last year, I was still in the hospital, just barely off a ventilator myself. That makes this reflection a little more jarring. My last post as about this journey was the day my breathing tube was removed. That was not the end of my medical journey and recovery, not by a long shot. I was downgraded from the ICU to a “medicine” unit, but I was a long way from being “well”. Being semi-comatose and bedridden for over a month took a[…continue reading]
March 3, 2020
Happy Detube Day
This post is a lot happier than the last one. This is the story about how I got transferred to an ICU closer to home, then got “extubated”: I got my breathing tube removed! My wedding day, and the day of my daughter’s birth, and others are obviously some of the happiest days of my life. But, March 3, 2019 is right up there too, a day I will remember very fondly for the rest of my life. Since I almost died February 5, then about a month later on March 3 is when I feel like I came back[…continue reading]
