Phase one: In which Doris gets her oats...or her IVIG

I'm beat. I'm gonna try to keep this short, the key word here is try. It doesn't seem that economy of words is my strong suit. Sorry.



Anyway, its been a long day. I didn't get home from work the night before until 1:30am. I had to unwind a little so I didn't hit the sheet till 2:10am. Then I had to be up and at 'em at 7am. (And I'm surprised I'm having a relapse....) I got to the infusion center just at 8:30am and they showed me back to my room. Take a look, it was actually pretty comfortable.


That chair is huge, I am a small guy, you could of fit three of me on it. So, the nurse comes in and she is beyond pleasant. She set me at ease very quickly. I don't know if I looked nervous, but I was....a bit. Not about the needles or anything, but they were about to pump me full of God knows what and who knows what my body was going to do with it. So she walks out and grabs my chart and sees my name and says, "Are you related to Beverly?" I thought on it for a second, the name Beverly didn't ring any bells. When suddenly it dawned on me that my Aunt Faye's first name is Beverly. She, for whatever reason, hates it and goes by her middle name. So it caught me by surprise that someone would call her that. However it still struck me as odd that my nurse might know her. We were pretty far away from where she and my Uncle live, and besides that she has been incapacitated by ALS for the last six years. I tell my friendly nurse this and she confirms that it is in fact my aunt she is talking about seeing how she worked at the hospital that my aunt sought treatment at. The world gets smaller everyday.
This, to me, was kismet. For whatever reason God, fate, or dumb luck had brought me here, under the care of this woman, and I knew I was gonna be alright. I have always had a great respect and love for my Aunt and Uncle and the fact that they were brought up out of the blue, destroyed any sense of nervousness that I had.

Well, now is where things get interesting, and my friendly nurse is glad that she knew my Aunt. Apparently the course of Salumedrol that I recently took has the tendency to make your veins a little less veiny. My friendly nurse had a little trouble sticking me. She was able to get under the skin, but then the vein would roll away. I watched her do it, 6 times, and it didn't matter how she tried those damn veins were just not cooperating. I took it in stride, I mean what else was I to do. Then my friendly nurse asked another just as friendly nurse to come in and "stab me". While the verbiage was a bit disconcerting I appreciated that she was looking for other avenues. The other friendly nurse came in and she was able to get a vein, after 3 sticks, but she got the vein. It became kind of comical after awhile. Again this could all be a different story if the friendly nurse didn't known my Aunt, but lucky for all of us she did.



They started the IV at about 10:30am.
Again the room was comfortable, there was a TV, I had some snacks, and my newspaper. I worked on the crossword puzzle a bit, read through mostly bad news, took a good two hour nap, watched Cash Cab, and some other TV. The drip itself made me a bit light headed and like I said I am pretty tired, but all in all it was a non-event. It just took a long long time, 4 and 1/2 hours. Although I got some kicking indigestion coming on right now. I'm gonna have to go find some tums. This is a relatively uninspired post, but I'll drop some serious knowledge tomorrow.