2 February 2021
I was minding my own business downstairs when I heard, "Mike! Mike!" The voice seemed familiar. "I need you!" It was Joyce.
When I got upstairs there she was framed in the extraordinarily bright light of the LEDs Mr. Mundstock recently installed when our old ballast retired. She was holding the lily pad and full drape in her hand.
"It came off," she explained.
I suppose I should have called Salwa the LVN but the girl works hard, driving around to seven or eight patients a day, it wasn't a decent hour and I knew what to do.
So I told Joyce to get on the bed so the foam pieces would stay in the wound while I found more drape and a new lily pad in our enormous collection of supplies. Apria sends a lily pad for each piece of foam it sends so we have twice as many as we need.
I cut a full drape in half and made sure it would cover the wound. Then I aligned it and started pulling off first the one inside backing and then the other. When the wound was sealed, I pulled the support sheet off the top and then yanked off the blue tab along one of the long edges.
I'd sealed the wound.
Then I cut a hole for the lily pad, positioned it and reinforced it with smaller slips of drape. I also reinforced the one known weak spot along the drape edge. When I turned on the Wound VAC, it got to 125 and quieted right down like I knew what I was doing.
Crisis averted. Don't tell Salwa.
℘
TODAY WAS LESS EVENTFUL. But we did have an appointment.
Joyce was in the passenger seat at 10:50 for her 11:30 Covid test on the other side of the park, a 15 minute drive.
I was nearly ready too. But Apple had released a security update and I was trying to install it on my two laptops that no longer support the operating system I had installed on them. So it was tricky.
One just needed the install (and as it turned out a few restarts). The other needed the hard drive (recently replaced with a larger but older model) updated, which was taking a while. I got as far as shutting them both down so I could continue when I returned.
We were there at 11:15 but there was no line of cars so I drove into the parking lot that has been reconfigured for drive-in Covid testing.
A guard stopped me. "Covid testing?" he guessed. It was either that or we were going to rob the pharmacy. I nodded in my mask. He pointed me to the right.
There were just two cars in front of us. A nurse got Joyce's Kaiser member ID without touching it and a few minutes later we were at the head of the line and another nurse came out to stick a big Q-tip up each nostril.
"Ouch!" Joyce cried. "Ouch!"
"You'll get your results in four days," the nurse promised.
And we drove home between rain storms where I successfully completed the update or you wouldn't be reading this.