How I Spent My “Fall” Vacation – Episode 27

Episode 27 – November 26 – For some reason I had a hard time getting to sleep last night and the woman beside me didn’t help. She spends a lot of time whining about her pain.

Even so I was wide awake at 5:00 and I did my first set of arm and chest exercises.

I almost had a disaster while I was readjusting my bed and bipap machine. I accidently knocked the tin of Sara’s cookies onto the floor but was lucky when the tip just flipped and while the lid was knocked loose it was only slightly ajar. I buzzed Marjory to rush in and immediately correct this near disaster.

Just before breakfast, they hauled in another pre-op patient with a broken hip to fill the last bed. She’s quite a bit younger than most of the patients so far, probably closer to my age

Amy’s my day nurse today. It’s the first time I’ve had her but I’ve seen her on the floor and she’s quite efficient and not too hard on the eyes to boot.

And of course, a vampire showed up this time for both blood counts and hemoglobin. That’s fine but when he took the extra vial “just in case there’s another test required” I was becoming suspicious. I have nothing against vampires just as long as they don’t “sparkle” when exposed to sunlight.

Breakfast has been much better since they changed the default settings to dry cereal. As far as the bananas go in hindsight I should have listed them as a food allergy.

Around noon just as I was drifting off, my buddy, Croft. It’s a scary sight just to see him but to wake up and see him standing over top of me was more than frightening. I will point out to all of my co-workers at the PNE, Croft is one of two people to blame for me working there; the other being Version 1.0’s mother. We sat and chatted about politics and trashed all our friends while I munched on my dry turkey sandwich. Croft started telling me a story about twisting his ankle while hiking and obviously I was giving him that look and he said “I’m not getting any sympathy from you on this, am I?” My reply was “Um, no. If you had started to tell me about the problems you  had with your kidney transplant, they maybe”. Then he proceeded to open the tin of Sara’s cookies and tried to fill his face. Actually, he only took one after I offered them to him twice.

Just after two, I was told that Amy would switching over to looking after some immediate post-op patients and Katrina would be looking after me for the rest of the day. Not exactly the best trade but Katrina seems okay. Hmmm...I wonder...did Amy meet Croft and bail out on me. Actually, I believe it was because Amy is an RN and Katrina is a LPN and treating immediate post-ops is much more involved.

Finally, the physio came by at 3 and did actually change the range of the braces to 30° at least for the time she was doing the passive movement. The bad thing is that the surgeon changed the order pushing the change to 60° back by two days. This was added to the chart without even checking on me.  I will be speaking to Dr. Haaf about this so he can put some pressure on the surgeon to speed up my rehab. I want to be out of this effing place before Christmas.

While we have a moment, let’s discuss some of the important issues of the day, at least as far as hospitals go. Today’s topic is “Paper vs. Plastic”. Of course, we are referring to urinal bottles. A few weeks ago I got to product test both items. I was originally quite surprised to see the cardboard pee bottles. They are made of a composite similar to the fish and chip trays you buy at the beach. The advantage I found with the plastic one is the body in narrower so it fit better between my braces. The problem was that being plastic it was unforgiving with regard to splash back situations while the cardboard ones being slightly absorbent don’t have this problem. You can see my entire report in the September 2013 issue of Consumer Reports. Trust me, it’s true because this is on the internet and you can’t post untruths on the internet. I know that because I read it on the internet.

The woman in the next bed had a couple of visitors and she kept talking/whining louder so came with a solution slap in the earbuds and do some serious headbanging with Warlock. Hmm... wouldn’t it be fun if I could crank that shit up in the entire ward. Hee hee!

Now if you remember the other day the Crown Prince brought me some dental floss. He, even more so than me, being  frugal bought the Real Canadian Superstore house brand “Exact”. I gave him a little bit of friendly grief about it then put it away. It turns that every three or four feet the dispenser jams. I have to open it up and reverse the roll. How hard can it be to machine wrap a spool of thread so it all unwinds in the same direction?

When the dinner fairy came around the choices were chicken or meatloaf. After a few nasty chicken dinners I chose the meatloaf thinking it would the same as the Salisbury steak and meatballs, tasteless but harmless. The pleasant surprise it was not bad and had a lot of flavour. And no, mom, I didn’t pick out all the onions. ;-)

Felly was my night nurse so that’s always a good thing. And it being a week night ,I got Rachel Maddow to read me a bed time story.

Just after 11 my left ankle started to twinge a bit similar to the gout flare up that happened a few nights ago. I called Felly and got her to pack it with ice and then she brought me a couple of Tylenol. This seemed to nip it in the bud.

And the effing tap is running again but the cookies are still damn tasty!

To be continued...