Notes from the Infirmary 2015 - ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!

gridlore, via text message 20 minutes ago: "I've now had three juice boxes. Body is confused, but I feel great." There's also an order in for Ensure. As I was typing this, he pinged again: "Finished my Ensure. I have chicken broth, but feel bloated."

This more than makes up for the lousy night I had; I was awake another two hours after last night's post, with my head spinning over how I really needed to be three people (wow, two years almost to the day since the last time I said that), so I'm running on maybe 4hrs of sleep. But knowing that he's on the path back to solid food and thence to discharge makes all the difference.

Notes from the Infirmary 2015 - The Waiting Game

Today was kind of an up and down day for both of us. The victory of being upgraded to a clear liquid diet brought with it the challenge of trying to ingest said diet after well over a week of insufficient intake and two full days of nothing by mouth. (More than once I found myself thinking of some of the other clients from my time at Cielo House as I fed gridlore his broth at lunchtime, watching him have to psych himself up for the next spoonful.) Two of our Burning Man campmates stopped by for a visit while I was still there, though, and that was good.

We were also visited by the director of the phlebotomy lab, who came up to personally apologize after qeldoq put a word or two in the right ears. She left a card with a handwritten note and her business card clipped to it, and the assurance that she was going to talk to the department as a whole and the techs who had worked with Doug in particular about listening to patients when they're trying to give relevant information.

At this point, we were both pretty well wrung out from the activity, and I knew that if I kept sitting there I was going to fall asleep, so I made my way back to the office.

After work, I had to swing by the house to bring Doug a change of clothes...and the apartment decided to greet me by having the ceiling light in the living room fail. Between having to change that out (which involved a stepladder and a dropped setscrew as I was trying to replace the exterior globe) and the few minutes of chores I had already been planning to do when I came home, I was lucky I managed to pull myself back out of my chair to go back to the hospital. I at least had a bulb to replace the dying one (it was a CFL, so it didn't blow like a regular incandescent bulb would have, but it developed the classic fluorescent flicker), but it's a lower wattage than the last one, and the color temperature is different as well, so I absolutely need to replace it as soon as I have five seconds to spare. Which will be sometime in October at this rate. :-P

(I'm also, as should come as no surprise, trying very hard not to think about money right now. I'd just told Doug on Saturday that we had $x left to spend before my next check on the 21st, allowing for the two auto-debits that I know are coming out of the account before then...and that went right out the window as soon as he was admitted. My life has been office-hospital-office-hospital-sleep since then, without the time to even throw something in the microwave here in my few conscious hours. Add in my determination to only bring food up to Doug's room that he wasn't going to be tempted by while he was still NPO, and there's been a lot more seafood in my diet this week that wasn't in the original budget. I'm a little afraid to check the bank balance. So going out to buy lightbulbs is not something I want to have to prioritize.)

Tonight's visit wound up being short, as we were both tired, but he was in better spirits than he'd been when I left in the afternoon. Hopefully, there will be good news come morning, in the form of a discharge plan.