The Leash

My apologies for taking nearly two weeks off since my last post. It's not like I was even doing anything important instead. I was just watching a lot of tv and such. But anyway, I'm back.

I had a few friends over last weekend. We went golfing, grilled some steaks, and had a bon fire. One of them claimed that he hadn't been to my house since my graduation party last year. My party was on June 29. So had been quite literally one year. And then I realized something, a lot of things happened that week that have not happened since.

First of all, the party was supposed to be on Saturday, June 28. It was postponed because I was in the hospital that week dealing with my second line infection that month. This is why that week was so momentous. My doctors feared I would simply continue to contract infections every few weeks, so we decided to give life a try without TPN. They took out my Hickman catheter and put in a PICC line for my antibiotics for the next few weeks. I have not had TPN since. It has been one full year since my last round of TPN. It had become such a routine during the seven months that I was on it, yet it was forgotten so easily. Every night my parents would get the pump out, pull a bag out of the refrigerator, and call me into the kitchen for my nightly calorie fix. And every morning they would wake me up to unhook everything and get ready for another day.

Those who have been on TPN or have been consistently around someone on TPN realize the rigors of this task, the mental fortitude needed to deal with being attached to a bag for 12 hours every night. I used to call it the leash. Someone would call to see if I wanted to go see a movie on a whim, and my reply would be, "Sorry, I can't. I'm on the leash." Again, unless you've been on TPN or have been consistently around someone on TPN, it's hard to comprehend the mental toughness necessary to handle such treatment. Especially when you're 18 years old. I had been in school for 13 years, waiting for this summer, and it was finally here. I was supposed to be out running around, painting the town red with my friends. Instead I was on a leash.

This also means it has been one year since my last extended hospital stay. I was at Akron City Hospital for five days, I believe. Since then I've been to E.R.'s a few times as written about previously, and I spent one night the weekend before exams, but that's it. Nothing more than one night. Anyone who has ever been a hospital over night, I'm sure, will agree that no matter what illness or medical malady you are dealing with, you will never get better in a hospital. No matter what Jada Pinkett Smith's "HawthoRNe" leads you to believe, nurses don't seem to care too much about their patients. They come in and out once every few hours to see if you need anything. If it's easy to get, they take their time getting it making sure you know just how inconvenient it is for them; if it's difficult, they wait until their shift ends and dump it on the next nurse. It's just like any other job. And in the hospital, doctors are like the cable company. O sure, they'll come by, but it will be sometime between 2 and 7:30. They come in, talk like an auctioneer using words familiar to them but foreign to you, and they move on to the next patient. Hospitals are loud, hot, and uncomfortable. The food is quite simply awful. At Akron City, they charge $7.50 for the use of the TV per patient per day. That's right. $7.50 per day to do the only thing there is to do in a hospital.

It also means it has been one year since I was not the lightest person in my immediate family. Once off of TPN permanently, the scale dropped like the Cleveland Indians' win percentage. Needless to say, my jinxing of the Freshman Fifteen did not work. But I'm home now, and I eat constantly (re: like Brad Pitt's character in Ocean's 11). And I have a little less than two months until school starts at the University of Akron, and I am officially christened a Zip.

Tomorrow, I undergo shockwave therapy to blast the large stone in my left kidney. This one has never caused me any pain, but doctors insist that it's there and needs to be removed. I'm not going to argue. I have to be at the hospital at 7 tomorrow morning. I don't even think the sun will be up that early. Ha. Shockwave therapy is when this outrageously expensive machine focuses intense sound waves at my kidney and the sounds waves (hopefully) crush the stone to dust. With any luck it will be very fine dust, because I will have to pass said dust, or gravel as my urologist calls it. I say that the machine is outrageously expensive because it is not owned by any one hospital. It travels from one hospital to another as it is needed. It probably doesn't help that it isn't need very often. But tomorrow it will be in Akron, focused at the left side of my lower back.

The good thing about this procedure is that it is non-invasive. No cutting and no inserting of objects in places where I do not want objects inserted. But I will be put under, because apparently having sound waves shot at you is a lot like getting beat up in a back alley. They say I will wake up bruised and sore with a lot of blood in the urine. So it's like I got jumped and am waking up the next morning with no recollection of the actual event.

This better work, or I'm going to have to jump my urologist in a back alley and give him a piece of my mind in the form of my sister's new bat. Ha. Just kidding. I'd use my nine-iron. Ha. Just kidding, again. I'd use my driver. Ha.

Don't mess with me. -IW