28 August 2020
Joyce slept all afternoon (and went to bed early, too). At dinner she said she felt a lot stronger than she felt in the hospital. And she likes the food here, too.
I feel an apology is in order. I'd expected to end this saga when Joyce came home. I even thought of calling the last piece Happily Ever After. But stuff keeps happening.
So I've kept this going in case you want to know what happened next. Sorry.
Even worse, I added a text search on the main page so you can look things up. The searches ignore case so you don't have to tap that Shift key on your phone (don't you hate that?). And wise guys can use regexes, too (for example, if you type "Tong|Cook" you'll find stories that mention either Tong or Cook).
You have no idea how sorry I am about that. Please forgive me.
She didn't even mind the half bottle of strawberry Ensure she had after lunch, just to try it. Some stores here sell Boost, others Ensure. I've been Assured they're the same.
I had the garlic and clam pizza in the oven (you can find the recipe in Society Garlic) and was dicing carrots for the salad when I heard the call come.
"Mike! Mike!"
I thought twice about it but decided to put the knife down before I went to see what the problem was.
Her Wound VAC was beeping. I pulled the cover up to see the touch screen and read the error message. The canister is not attached, it complained.
Of course the canister was attached. It had been attached. It wasn't going anywhere on its own. And I jiggled it just to make sure. It didn't even jiggle. It was attached.
But the touchscreen was unmoved.
It did look full, though, so I thought I'd apply Tyler Smart's lesson this morning on how to replace it. Before I killed off those brain cells with that scotch I bought last week.
I've come to believe I understand that the Wound VAC sucks everything it can out of the wound all day and night. The engineers call this "negative pressure." So nothing festers. I call that "negative fester."
But the stuff has to go somewhere. So the vacuum pump sucks it through a long tube into a plastic canister attached to the side of the pump that sits in a little black bag Joyce slings over her shoulder like a purse.
Most of the time the pump sounds like rain plopping on a skylight as it pumps away. But every once in a while it makes a sound exactly like you've had two more pieces of garlic and clam pizza than you should have.
Very embarrassing when cavorting in public.
Anyway, back to the emergency. I pinched off the tube from her wound and pinched off the tube from the full canister and disconnected them, removing the canister from the pump. I put the full canister in a plastic bag for disposal like a diaper in our black bin. And then I slipped the new canister onto the pump, connected its tube to the tube coming from the wound and released both clamps.
How'd I do, Alana1?
Anyway, you should have seen the salad after that. Talk about surgery!