August 28

Holy fuck, I'm having a bad day.

Sam, the cute university student on my team, was here at 5:30 am to remove the stitches from my face, neck, and lip. It took him an hour. He was very patient, very gentle, and did an excellent job. I promised him cookies. :-)

Unfortunately, there was leakage from the left side. For those of you who were walking this path with me last year, does that sound familiar??? Although last year it was the right side. Sam got Priya, she said it was fine. So, he finished taking all the stitches out.

BTW,  Sam gave me some hierarchy scoopage. In ascending order, Priya is an R3, Ryan is an R4, Brendan (hottie red head) is an R5 which is one step below Dr. M who is my main attending.

So, Brendan stopped in to check me out. He started to milk the discharge and a good 5-6" strip of the wound reopened. Again, sounding familiar? At least he milked it before it got infected. I didn't get to it until after infection set in last year.

So now suddenly he doesn't want the drain or staples to come out of my leg. I'm supposed to take it easy today and try not to turn my neck.

Then Michelle came to see me. Nothing too new there to report other than that the valve that gets replaced every 4-6 months isn't covered by insurance and they're $250 each. Ouch!

So, Brendan was just here and put 5 new stitches in my neck and used ~20 steri strips on the rest of it. Talk about unpleasant. My day just isn't going well.

On the bright side, baby doll stopped in this morning to see me. He helped me change my bedding and got me cleaned up. I felt 300x better after that. Just having him next to me working towards a goal, even something as small as making a bed, gives me a sense of contentment and connection. After he left for work, my nurse, Linda, asked how long we had been together. When I told her 7 months she almost fell over. She said she would have guessed 7 years. She couldn't believe how tender and gentle he was with me. She said I had found one of the few good ones out there, not to mention how attractive he is, and she said I had better not let him go. I told her I was holding on as tight as I could!

The one good thing I managed today was getting Abigail to remove that nasty IV that was on my wrist bone. We went back to the old one in the crook of my arm last night. Then this morning I got Brendan to agree to take me off the IV antibiotics and am now on feeding tube antibiotics. Thank god! I'm happy to stay here an entire extra week if it means no more IV's!

I had a thought at 4 am. I've gotten a lot of different reactions to the fact that I live alone, none of which have been positive. Which, of course, pisses me off to no end. I'm not settling for mediocrity or downright unhappiness simply to avoid being alone in life. Anywho, if I decide to go the roommate route, I was thinking I might be able to advertise for a med student, like Sam who took out my stitches this morning. I can give them low rent in exchange for keeping a medical eye on me. That might satisfy a bunch of different needs!

Although I'm not sure how I would deal with a roomie like Nurse Abigail. She is absolutely the sweetest nurse (gorgeous too) but oh my goodness she's a slob! Every time she leaves my room I'm up and out of bed picking up after her! She leaves a trail of half filled cups, empty wrappers, goop on my Kindle case....sheesh! She's damn lucky she's so cute.

Okay, I'm going to see about a nap. Maybe that will kickoff an improvement in my miserable day.