I just love to hate that old curse, " May you live in interesting times" , with the idea that famine, flood and pestilence are all very interesting. My idea of the perfect wish for someone would be, " May you live a boring life". Quick , somebody wish that for me!!!!
My wound vac (a really cool piece of technology that uses a vacuum to help big wounds heal faster) got a blockage at 2 am on Saturday morning and I spent the rest of the night trying to resolve that. I finally called the home health care nurse at about 5 am, and she said she would send someone out in the AM to change everything, just to turn it off for now. I had dealt with her before and I trusted her. I did what I was told, but the on call nurse for Saturday (I had not had dealings with her before) did not want to come out to help me. She kept insisting that she would just walk us through changing the canister~ when Cary and I both knew just by the process of elimination the canister was not the problem. Both Kim and Donna, the nurses that came out to my home were lovely, but we were both sort of frustrated by Gloria. Being an on call nurse means by definition, covering any problems that arise~ am I too far off base on that one?! grrrrr....
Anyway, long story short, we were fine just letting it be until Monday as I had a followup appointment with Dr. Soukiasian, and we knew he would handle this no problem.
Well, then about 10:00 am, I was mid dose giving myself medicine through my feeding tube, when it got unimaginably clogged. I was next to tears as I had tried to be so @###!!##T&** careful about flushing it, even going so far as to flush it whenever I took a sip of water. That way I knew I was WAY over the minimum amount of before and after each dose of meds, before and after each feeding and 4 x a day on top of that. This was a bit more serious, so I called the home health care nurse again, and she advised me to go to the local urgent care. We both were not comfortable with that, so we called the on call dr . for Dr Soukiasian, Dr Parker. She told us to come into the ER and in the meantime try to put Diet Coke (of all things) into the tube on the drive up. Apparently it sometimes helps to breakup blockages. Who knew?!
Well, as we were getting ready to leave, Cary called poor little Haley bug (she took this weekend to go on a river rafting trip),and bless her heart, she cut the trip short and immediately headed here to watch the boys for us. And she was so sweet and cheerful about it!!! ( people - never wonder why I love these kids so dang much!!!) Just as we hung up, our home teacher called us and asked what he could do for us (THANK YOU QUINTON for listening to that little voice!!!!!). He and his sweet family watched the boys until Haley could make it the nearly 4 hours back from Bakersfield.
Long story short, new feeding tube put in,wound vac taken off and wet to dry dressing applied and Cary is now trained how to do that new kind of dressing. I was so proud! He didn't faint or get queezy once!!! I have to admit, we've both kinda toughened up a bit since all this started... I could be wrong, but I really think we are tough enough now and am really praying for that boring life to start..... any ....second .....now....
