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Five-Month Hospital Nightmare: Prednisone, Thirst, and Immobility

Day 2 · 1:25:54 · Cameron Hitchcock · Shawn Buckley

  • 🏥 Hitchcock spent five months in hospital with repeated readmissions as nephrotic syndrome worsened and fluid overloaded his body.
  • 💊 High-dose prednisone caused severe mood swings and thirst while Lasix and fluid limits left him desperately dehydrated.
  • 🚑 By Canadian Thanksgiving he woke unable to sit up and had to be bear-hugged onto a stretcher by paramedics.

Hitchcock details the psychological and physical toll of prolonged hospitalization before dialysis.

← Hitchcock’s Rapid Onset of Nephrotic Syndrome After Pfizer | Blistered Feet, Bedside Debridement, and Permanent Dialysis →

Transcript

Cameron Hitchcock · 1:25:54

It's a lot of protein. Um, and then, yeah, at this point, that's when I'm up to 260 pounds.

Shawn Buckley · 1:26:00

So I just, I just want to interpret. So your kid— this protein's not supposed to be in your blood anywhere near these levels. So that means your kidneys are failing.

Cameron Hitchcock · 1:26:09

Yeah, they're scarred. It's— I had minimal change. I had nephrotic syndrome, so there's protein spilling out of my blood into my, into my urine.

Shawn Buckley · 1:26:20

Okay. Um, how long are you in the hospital? They said 3 days.

Cameron Hitchcock · 1:26:24

I was there for 5 months with 2— they released me twice to try to get me home and, and I guess help in that sense, um, and then monitored, like, but I kept going back. I kept getting worse.

Shawn Buckley · 1:26:40

So what, what happens to you mentally when you're spending 5 months in the hospital?

Cameron Hitchcock · 1:26:45

Uh, well, I was on— I, after the biopsy, they diagnosed me with FSGS, or excuse me, they diagnosed me with minimal change disease. Which can be treated with prednisone. It's— I've heard from a lot of nurses that it's a miracle. You, you heard situations like that and you take the prednisone and one day your kidneys turn back on because it, it eliminates the, the inflammation. Um, so they put me on 60 milligrams of prednisone, which, uh, has significant psychological effects. A bit of a lightweight, so it affected me quite a bit. It gives you mood swings. It's It causes like a— there's a whole— it affects your whole body. Um, and I was also on Lasix continuously. So you combine those two things and I was— I just was thirsty. Like, I've never known thirst like that in my life. Uh, and I wasn't allowed to drink much water, um, because obviously I wasn't getting rid of it, uh, very fast.

Cameron Hitchcock · 1:27:46

With the Lasix and the albumin. So I was, I was extremely thirsty. Just I've heard, I heard someone on the CBC describe— a guest on the CBC said that they, they've heard that a high dose of prednisone is similar to something like speed. It's a very, it's a very powerful drug. So I was in there the whole time You know, it was just a terrible experience. It was a nightmare. But the whole point of the prednisone, like I said, the reason why they were doing this was because the only other way to get the fluid off me was dialysis, and dialysis would kill your kidney function.

Shawn Buckley · 1:28:25

And at this time when you're in the hospital, I mean, you basically have lost your ability to move. Can you share with us what that experience was like?

Cameron Hitchcock · 1:28:32

That progressed, uh, throughout the 5 months. I could walk, um, at a certain point. They weren't just like it where they weren't sure if the lack of mobility was from the Lasix pulling the potassium out of my blood. So there was some problems with mobility then. But then at the— at a certain point, this is my third discharge between my third and fourth admission. We're talking around Canadian Thanksgiving, October. I wake up one morning And, um, I can't sit up. Um, and then eventually, um, an ambulance is called and the paramedics, uh, strap me to a skid chair, like a sit-up, um, sit-up stretcher, and they get me out of my house. Um, now I can't even walk to, like, transfer from the stretcher, from the, from the chair to the, to the stretcher.

Cameron Hitchcock · 1:29:33

So they have to bear hug me and then bring the stretcher behind me and then put me on the, on the stretcher in the ambulance.

Shawn Buckley · 1:29:41

I'm just going to pull up, um, two photos because, um, around that time you start getting blistering on your feet.