After the CAT scan of the left leg yesterday everything was moving toward the next step, drawing the clot out of the leg there, and maybe with a need to stay overnight. Instead, everyone was called to help the injured officer and after a couple hours the doctors decided on a different treatment. I got a compression stocking put on, a little shot in the stomach, and (after no lunch) a sandwich which bore no comparison to the fare at French Hospital here. Me, under 190 this morning! This is not bad. I did not want overnight in any hospital. So now twice a day I get to throw a plunger into the stomach--just for 10 days. Then I get blood thinner pills for a few months. And the mistress of all situations has located more Size J anti-embolism stockings in New Hampshire. In 1956 and 1957 I was getting horse needles in the belly every week in pneumoperitoneum shots of air. These 20 plungers are cute little things, disposable, and after losing weight with Valley Fever it's easy to bunch up enough skin to poke. I learned in the mid 1950s that you do not put a needle to your thigh and hesitantly press it in--you do a quick flip of the wrist and get it done. This is nothing, now, that we can't handle. Now, if the fluconazole would just go back to clearing up the eye and if it did not all but knock me to the floor with dizziness . . . .
This is being ungrateful. I have a history. A diagnosis of TB in Louisiana in 1955. Accurate, but for the first months treatment consisted in being in a holding warehouse with plenty of food but no drug treatment or other treatment except surgery. In 1989, doctors in Wilmington, Delaware, drawing up chairs by my hospital bed and one saying, very happily, "HEAVILY INTO ANAL, EH?" They had just seen an AIDS video about how middle aged Caucasian men who showed up with shingles might have something worse, and they were delighted, genuinely stoked to find a case. They got me a private room, and a morphine pump until I made the terrible mistake of mentioning how much I liked it. At least I had a view of the Washington Street Bridge to myself for a week. In 2020, a diagnosis from a great ocular oncologist on the West Coast not of Melanoma because that is slow growing but of some more horrendous cancer advancing to my eye out of a body riddled with cancer. The AIDS diagnosis gave me a private room and the CANCER diagnosis upended our lives for three weeks. We behaved so well that I never want to have to go through that again. At least we thought about priorities and have new Wills. Now, a diagnosis of deep vein thrombosis, accurate, but nothing we can't handle as long as I don't fall from the other drugs. Falling is sternly warned against when you are on blood thinner. Not the Downward Spiral, oh no. And what will tomorrow bring?
No comments:
Post a Comment