Forward to May, 2007...

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Monday 4-30-07

NEWSFLASH!

This is actually being written in May (5-19-07) but I hate to skip months, and April was very difficult.

Continued from March -- mom was checked out from the hospital for the second time on April 2nd and came home with a packed deep abdominal wound and an IV line and syringe antibiotics supply. The antibiotic had to be administered via syringe (together with three additional syringes of stuff) three times a day every eight hours, which means I had to get up in the middle of the night to do that two times out of three (when the nurse came).

The homecare nurse came the very next day, packed her wound and did the IV, and on Wednesday April 4th, two nurses came, including a vac machine specialist. Mom was attached to an abdominal suction vacuum machine that is a portable brick-like unit that can be worn on a strap and has a catheter line running to the abdomen that sucks at the wound.

Also, on Friday the 6th of March, that same week Mom was admitted for the third time into a different hospital, to have an outpatient procedure done, a permanent IV line put in, called a PICC line that goes direclty to a major artery and can be left in place for a long time (the other temporary IVs can only be left in for up to 72 hours, and mom has bad, hard-to-locate veins, so it would have been very difficult for her). In addition, they also sent us a portable antibiotic pump machine, also worn on a strap that can administer the antibiotic automatically three times a day, and that way we could sleep at night. They also gave a different antibiotic supply for this type of machine, in a drip pouch. So, mom got that and walked around for several weeks with two machines strapepd on each shoulder and waist -- poor thing!

On April 17th, Tuesday, after the doctor's appointment, the IV antibiotic bags were discontinued, but the IV PICC line remained in place for later chemo treatments, so that meant that the homecare nurse came three times a week to do that wound and to flush the line, while the rest of the days I flushed the line with saline, etc.

The rest continued in May...

Vera Nazarian is a speculative fiction author, artist, and creator of wonder.