Question: I cannot believe I have now been in the hospital for the dx'd saddle PE discovered a little more than two weeks ago. I am a female, age 63, and prior to this, have not been physically ill except for a hip replacement in 2010.

A couple of questions:

First, 3 months ago I tripped at home and broke my right collar bone.

2 months ago, another freak accident where I tripped going down the back steps due to neighbors' cat occupying one of the middle steps. He was asleep but when I didn't readily see him up against the steps, I stepped in the middle of him. We both scrambled to get out of each other's way, but not before I had jammed my right arm into the iron post in the stairwell and cracked my left humorous. It being a minor crack, no further treatment was given.

The doozey, accident # 3, occurred about 3 weeks ago. I was in my rocking recliner when I dropped some papers in my lap and bent forward toward the solid oak floor beaneath in an attempt to retrieve the dropped papers now on the floor in front of my rocking recliner.

I guess my weight or the build of the chair pulled me farther over than intended and I ended up going head first onto the solid oak floor.

From that, I got a cerebral hemmorage concussion, but the nerusurgeon said the bleeding was minimal, so after 2 days in the hospital I was released with nothing more than massive headaches.

Shortly after, in having my vitals checked due to sudden onset of shortness of breath, the doc found my Ox Sat to be 81. So back to the hospital I went, and have remained for 2+ weeks as the Coumadin given to me was starting to show improvent, That was at a dose of .75. That improvement took several days until I hit 1.9 and then 2.2.

The day after those two readings, the hospital pharmacy dropped my Coumadin dose from .75 to .5, and guess what? I lost ground on the readings by a couple points, but the pharmacy did not raise the coumadine level back to .75. I'm still at .5 on the Coumadin dose and have lost more ground, losing another point or two in the subsequent readings.

If the .75 dose was producing good results to get me out of this hospital sooner, why did the pharmacy go monkeying around with the doseage amount; as if fixing something that wasn't broken in the first place?

And why did the doctor merely shrug his shoulders upon learning the pharmacy had reduced a Coumadin dose that was proving to be effective, to a lower dose that is proving to be less than effective?

I don't know how the Medicare coverage I went on 2 months ago works, but with commercial health insurers, they'll only pay for a set number of in hospital days. With my now Medicare insurance, are hospitals able to prolong a patient's number of hospital days up to the full 190 Medicare allows per year?

Good God I hope that I'm not going to be stuck in this hospital for another number of weeks all because I'm adding to some profit margin.