A new port in the storm…
Last week was my first, out-of-the-hospital week of 3x/week blood tests, but these needle pokes have become more numerous and more difficult as my platelet count drops and as the multiple stick-bruises mount up. I can handle most of the other stuff, but my anxiety about these increasingly unsuccessful attempts is causing more distress than anything. Remember how I turned down the subdermal port back a couple of weeks ago? Now I’m regretting that decision, but a long-time friend (thank you, Sheri!) wrote me this that helps alleviate the regret I’ve been feeling as we’ve now re-scheduled the port placement procedure for January 9: “Sounds like solid thinking on the port. It's important that YOU have things done at YOUR pace - so way to go, allowing yourself a pause on getting it.” I like that – we took a pause, a breath, before going to extremes I wasn’t comfortable with. No regrets – just moving on.
Friday morning (12/29) it took 2 attempts to get a blood draw. Results came
back saying I needed a platelet infusion – the soonest I could get was an appointment for the next day (another
stick!). That evening our son Jay was coming up to spend our official family “Christmas
Eve” having pizza, watching Christmas movies and prepping for “Christmas” the
next day with Travis and Nikkie. Jay arrived about 5:00, got settled in and we
started prepping for dinner. At about 7:30 I went to the bathroom and saw these
dark purple splotches ALL OVER MY THIGHS! “JOEL!!!! COME HERE!!” Holy shit – I
have never seen anything like that. The first thing that came to mind was that
my blood vessels had ruptured and I was going to bleed to death. (Seems this actually is not going to kill anyone and is
not uncommon for people with thrombocytopenia – low blood platelets) but it’s scary-looking
as shit, and takes forever to heal to normal again.
PVH ED entrance
A trip to the ED
We called the on-call hematologist who suggested I go to the Emergency
Department right away at PVH and go ahead and get the platelet infusion there that
night rather than waiting until the next morning. So we all packed up and headed to
the Emergency Room, arriving at about 8:30.
The pros in the ER made a first attempt at an IV – no luck, but then had
good success on the second. I’ve given lot of blood and had a lot of needle
sticks in my life, but this one sucked everything out of me – the room started spinning,
my stomach and head were spinning, I couldn’t move. I wanted to vomit but
couldn’t. (One of the things that can cause this is your blood pooling down to your feet rather than circulating normally.) They got me laying down, raised my feet and the world settled down again.
Platelets were ordered, and they started the infusion
which should have taken about an hour. But over an hour in I
realized that my left hand where the IV is had swollen badly. They had to move the IV
to another spot, meaning my 5th needle stick for the day! We finally
got out of there at midnight, got home, put on National Lampoon’s Christmas
Vacation and Joel cooked the pizzas on the Ooni at 1:00 in the morning. Best pizzas ever!
Trill, baby Trill!
Some of you may know that Trills are symbiont characters in some of the Star
Trek series who have
distinctive spotted/markings on their bodies, particularly their face, neck and
shoulders. So, we’ve decided that I must have acquired a symbiont on Friday
night and am now an official member of the Trill community.
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| Trill characters from Star Trek: Jadzia Dax (Deep Space Nine) and Gray Tal (Discovery) |
Happy 123123 (12/31/23) everyone! Hoping 2024 brings us all love, friendship, sanity and health!
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