All was well once we arrived at Holbrook RV Park on Ft. Stewart, Georgia. We, thoroughly, enjoyed the Holiday season surrounded by our RVing family. Thanksgiving was great as we ate our meal with the troops and their families on post. As last year, this is a very special time. The days leading up to Christmas was wonderful. We were able to enjoy the season's spirit in Savannah and the surrounding area. Much different than that of Maryland. It was really nice.
As Christmas came and went, we had settled into preparing for the New Year. Our plans were to depart Holbrook mid-January traveling farther south into Florida spending the rest of the winter there. On the evening of December 30th, those plans came to a screeching halt.
It was about 7PM when we sat down to enjoy a simple and quick meal of dirty rice and beans. On the second bite, Joyce started to choke. We had both immediately supposed she had aspirated some rice. She could not breathe and began choking more severely. I stood her up and performed the Heimlich maneuver on her with no results. Now chest pains were accompanying the choking and belabored breathing. Her skin coloring had turned chalky. I sat her down, ran next door to alert our neighbors and rushed her to the emergency room at Winn Army Hospital just a few minutes away. They immediately took her and administered oxygen which seemed to temporarily relieve her breathing difficulties and chest pains.
They preformed a series of the tests and once the results were back they diagnosed her as being in congestive heart failure. They quickly placed her in the intensive care unit and kept her overnight in an effort to stabilize her blood pressure and fluids.
I made it back to our RV around midnight and the boys were besides themselves with anxiety. They knew something was wrong and the absence of their Mommy was very disturbing to them. I got them up on the bed with me and was finally able to settle them. We did not sleep very well that night.
I brought Joyce back from the hospital around 10AM the next morning (New Years Eve) with an envelope full of instructions for further follow-up. She was feeling better, but very tired. The boys went crazy when they saw her. They would not leave her side for the rest of the day. The instructions called for extensive follow-up and testing with a cardiologist. Since I was already seeing a cardiologist in Savannah she chose to see him, also. So then it began, almost two months of continuous testing and doctor visits for the both of us. Me? Because this episode caused my already very high blood pressure to dangerously elevate creating great concern with my cardiologist. We realized we were going to have many doctor appointments and being so far away from our doctors in Savannah (70+ mile round trip), we reluctantly decided to move to the Hunter Army Airfield RV park (click here) in Savannah proper. This placed us within a few miles of our doctors.
To make an already long story a bit shorter, the final outcome for Joyce was the cardiologist disagreed with the army doctor's diagnosis of congestive heart failure. His testing showed her heart healthy and gave her a clean bill of health save some diet restrictions like salt, fatty foods, etc. He was at a loss as to what caused the choking incident, but he suspected it was due to aspirating some food which in turn brought on a panic attack. As for me, he was able to get my blood pressure under control by adjusting my medications. Just a few days after Joyce's final results, he told me the same thing and with the same diet restrictions. We can live with that. Easily.
This brings us up to today, our final day, for a while, here in Georgia. The day started with a light rain which now has stopped. It has become muggy and warm with threatening thunder storms. Typical spring day, even though it is not spring yet, here in the Georgia Low Country. Since we were able to get most of the outdoor preparation-to-move things done yesterday, today will be, mostly, indoors tidying up and putting things away. Our destination tomorrow is the Pelican Roost RV Park (click here) on the Mayport Naval Station just a few miles northeast of Jacksonville. Mayport is located at the mouth of the St. Johns River and is a very busy shipping area for both commercial and naval vessels. We'll be there a week before we move on to Homosassa Springs on Florida's west coast.
Our adventure finally begins. Look out Florida for here we come.
