Well, that was hellacious news to wake up to. Felon47 wanted a war of his own? Those Epstein files are cutting awfully close.
Writing the rest of this in hopes that someone finds it who’s facing doing this process and hasn’t ever yet: if I can, you can.
After he spent nine days in the hospital on IV antibiotics, it’s been a week of two and a half hour at-home infusions at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. and a different one at 2:30 p.m. that takes five minutes per stopwatch to slowly go in but then it’s in, all three requiring I take the med out of the fridge an hour beforehand. Timers are our friend. We both got taught how to do this so that between us we wouldn’t forget any steps on what was at first a highly unfamiliar and uncomfortable process.
Don’t touch the blue part! (He was carefully holding only the bottom of it.)
I am so you won’t pull on it. (There being a needle at the far end for him.)
So, with some hovering mid-air between us, I screwed the other piece on without touching the blue it was screwing onto. It worked. Alcohol wipe, saline infusion, alcohol wipe, med, then alcohol wipe, saline, plastic cap. Oh yeah and the open/close the valves part: if it’s not going in, that’s where it went wrong. The number of valves varied. If it’s only almost not going in, that’s the stopwatch med, it wants to make you go as slow as you’re supposed to with a full minute between partial pushes and that timer is absolutely necessary.
The one thing I don’t get, though, is going through all the steps to completely disinfect my hands and then grabbing a paper towel to dry them. In college I had a job on an assembly line for *plastic medical goods and I saw how that place was run, FDA cleanliness regulations or no. (I would have reported them, had I been able to figure out how back then when a simple phone call to the East Coast could cost you a day’s wages, or figure out how to even get that number. Today’s generations have no idea how much better their world is because my parents’ peers broke up the monopoly of Ma Bell.)
So. A paper towel as a germ-secure tool? Seriously? But then after the antiseptic and the towel they have you Purell and shake, no towel. Well alright then.
The last IV is about done and the fridge has officially reclaimed its space for food. Unscrew, alcohol wipe, cap it off and we’re done. The PCC line allegedly comes out Monday morning, but we’ll know for sure after the doctor sees that foot.
Baby steps.
* Let me hasten back to add that those were not items along the lines of these syringes, they were larger plastic items used in hospitals, like barf bowls. Still.