It's a weird day. My mouth is full of sores but my shoulder and leg feel better. Apparently, I have better neutrophils due to the two days of shots to accelerate those. I told the nurse it was nice to see something working on me. I can also hope that the H.Pylori will be eradicated from my stomach even if it has no effect on the platelet situation.
Now, I sit in the IV chair awaiting platelets as I sip my coffee and watch an oil rig burning on the TV. The IV is in my wrist today. Normally, I don't like those but the nurse did a fine job sticking me and it's working well. It's the hand pokes that typically don't work out well for some reason. The veins are deceptively full and invite the poke, only to deny a strong entry and I end up with a poke somewhere else.
The Benadryl is taking effect. The working this week has been helpful to my state of mind, but has supplanted other activities of import as well.
After this I have to make my way to the neurologist. Bad planning actually. I forgot I might be affected by Benadryl. Hmmm. Well, I'm armed with two MRI CDs and I get to find out if that bleeder in my brain has resolved some.
I've made a couple of suggestions here at the hospital too. The first was simple... how can we find a way to get all of the platelets in the bag into me before we're done? Putting a couple of heads together, the nurse team devised a method for topping off the bag with saline and driving the platelets all the way through. This wouldn't be needed if it wasn't for a special filter they use as extra protection from rogue white cells still in the platelet mix. The second suggestion was prompted when one of the cancer patients was talking about her efforts to get here from the far away parking lot on the other side of the hospital. Oncology has limited reserved parking... maybe 10 spots... and if those are gone, you end up in Timbuktu or valet parking on the other side. So I said... why not let people valet park and the parking attendant that has to drive the car to park it anyway can give you a ride back up to the other side and drop you off at oncology. So, the head nurse here liked the idea and ran it up the chain... apparently, it went all the way up the chain until one of the Master links noted that the valet contract doesn't allow the drivers to leave the property, which means they can't go on the 500m stretch of road to get from one parking lot to another. Nice. However, they offered to provide transporters to wheel people up from the valet to the oncology through the hospital. That's progress.
Okay. This is the longest post on this blog.
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