It's a sunny day in Asheville, NC. Although the population in this "city" is approximately 76,000, it's a small town compared to where I grew up. Here in the teaching hospital though, the medical team I decided to join today is in high spirits. The past 12 days have been nothing but foggy weather and rain. You'd think I was in Seattle. But that's not what makes today's sunny day significant.
Our 700+ lb patient is getting discharged today, after having massive abdominal pains, but the discharge is dependent on the weather. I don't know if you've ever seen person over 400 lbs in real life, but seeing 700lbs of human flesh on one person, it's surreal. A king size bed in a small hospital room, I have absolutely no idea how he was able to go through the door, much less get transported to the hospital. Imagine getting 6 people, tying them together with a single rope so they're all entrapped in the rope. Then covering them all with a huge bedsheet, except for one person's head. That's what it looked like.
Having been admitted for abdominal pain, it was found out that he had a gangrenous GI organ. Ordinarily, a normal person would have went to the operating room immediately to have it taken out. Unfortunately for this man, no surgeon within a 100 mile radius would dare to slit a scapel through his flesh. If anesthesia put him under, there was absolutely no guarantee he could come out of it alive. So we gave him 4 days of antibiotics, and sent him home with a drain poking out of his abdomen, along with a supply of oral antibiotics.
Now getting him home. Transporting him physically from the hospital to his home according to his family would take 4 trucks. I thought they were kidding, but the more I thought about it, I realized they were serious. To get from the bottom floor outside to his bedroom in the floor required construction workers to hoist the man onto a contraption that would then be lifted by a crane (I'm dead serious), but this was only after a considerable part of the paneling of the house was removed to insert his body into the bedroom. And all this cannot happen if it is raining. Rain today would mean no discharge until Thursday.
Miraculously, after 12 days of rain, we had a sunny day.
