UPS AND DOWNS

You know how Chinese restaurants always have the cat figurines, with perpetually waving paws? Well, this little statue is like that, but she does the "Queenly Wave."

Par for the course, this hospital saga is filled with ups and downs. On the plus side, my tea tasted really good this morning, which means I'm starting off in a much better frame of mind than I was in yesterday. It's amazing how much little things like that matter, when you are dealing with a lot of stress.

The biggest plus is that the staph infection was very localized this time -- not coursing through my hubby's entire bloodstream, as it was last time -- so, now that the metal gizmo which was the source (and which seemed to protect it from the antibiotics) is gone, it should be much easier to treat.

On the downside, Infectious Disease doc has recommended leaving the wound open and keeping him in the hospital until the early part of next week, and not doing anymore surgery until after that. Soooo, when they said "a few days" in the hospital, what they really meant was the usual week and a half.

On the upside, that means I'm not the one who will be unpacking, cleaning out, and repacking that hole in hubby's chest, as I would have been if they had sent him home with an external pacemaker to wait it out. Yippee! They have a special Wound Care nurse who does nothing but that. She has an icky job.

On the downside, IVs don't last indefinitely. Yesterday my hubby's started leaking while they were trying to do his 2:00 infusion of antibiotics, which means they had to stop it, remove the IV, and start a fresh one. Or at least try. It seems my hubby has flat run out of veins that will work. For four or five hours they brought in one person after another, moving up the ranks of people with "the magic touch", letting each one of them poke, prod and stick him for at least a half hour, with him not making a peep, and even trying to cheer THEM up when they got frustrated and upset, but to no avail. Finally they brought in the lady who does the PIC lines, and had her searching for veins on his neck with a sonogram or something like that, and even that didn't help. But then, just by chance, she managed to find a place on his wrist where they could get one started. Let's all pray that it lasts until he's out of the hospital!

On the upside, in between his every-four-hours infusions, he's not attached to anything, so he's completely mobile, and free to move around.

On the downside, he's free to move around -- as long as he doesn't get out of range of the heart monitoring equipment. He can make two complete rounds of his allotted territory in less than five minutes. No trips down to the pretty courtyard garden, the cafeteria, or the gift shop, I'm afraid. Yep, someone's fixin' to start climbing the walls.

On the upside, though he is sans pacemaker for the time being, his heart seems to be chugging along just fine. No alarms have gone off. No one has rushed into his room yelling "CODE BLUE!" or anything. Which kinda makes you wonder...did he really need the pacemaker in the first place, or was someone in the ER at that other hospital just imagining things?