Joyce's KP Adventure mikepasini.com headlines
A Late Date
29 September 2021
I haven't been able to get to the hospital every day. I missed Monday and thought I'd have to miss Tuesday but I realized I don't mind eating dinner in the dark with candlelight so I went over around 6 p.m. and took Joyce for a walk around the ward.
She wanted to wave hello to everybody and wish Elise a happy 14th birthday. I have to think when today's teens are my mother's age (94) no one is going to believe what it was like to have been a teenager during the pandemic.
Dr. Tong dropped by earlier in the day to tell Joyce pretty much what she had discussed with me on Friday.
She had a dressing change Monday. The usual schedule will be Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But she had one this morning to inspect the wound and the news wasn't as good as we had hoped.
There is more yellow slough started to grow in the wound, inhibiting the good tissue's growth. Dr. Tong wants to return to the operating room tomorrow for another debridement, re-evaluating the situation during the dressing change on Friday.
So she won't be home this week.
There is some good news, though, I learned in my chat with Cat the Physician's Assistant this morning. Joyce did not need an epidural for pain management during Monday's dressing change, just Tylenol and oxycodone. That's the criteria for returning home.
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WHERE HAVE I BEEN, you might wonder. I wondered myself.
Since Friday I've been working on a plumbing problem at my mother's house.
The drip from the pressure relief valve in her water heater became a leak on Friday. Mundstock and I put a new valve in that afternoon. It turned the leak into a drip again.
Saturday when Alice brought over groceries she noticed it was leaking again so I went over to empty the bucket. Mundstock came over and we tried lowering the temperature. The leak stopped so we went to dinner but when we returned the valve had started to drip again. I put a hose on the end of the down spout and ran it out the garage door.
Sunday morning I checked on it. The hose wasn't terribly effective (the garage door clamped down on it) but it helped a little. I went back to a bucket. At home I arranged for Bay Area Water Heaters to come Monday afternoon to replace the heater. Then I went back to empty the bucket for the night.
Monday Bay Area Water Heaters rescheduled for Tuesday when one installer called in sick and the other had to go to a funeral. I go over to empty the bucket and arrange a cascading series of three buckets to catch the overflow so I don't have to come back again until Tuesday. Bay Area Water Heaters rescheduled once more to midday.
I went over Tuesday to meet the Bay Area Water Heaters installer. He took a look at the installation and realized his heater would be too tall to maintain the slop of the vent that tucks under the heater ducts. So he couldn't do the installation after all.
He thought if the leak was coming from the relief valve that the expansion tank might be the culprit. Try replacing that for $50, he suggested.
I was about to do that when my mother got through to George Salet, the plumber to the Jesuits. On Friday, when I called, they said they couldn't come out until next week. But she got them come out between 2 and 4 as a special favor to her.
So I went home for a couple of hours before returning just as Jose was calling me to find out what the problem is. I told him the whole story. He cried. I gave him a tissue.
He thought the expansion tank was fine. He gave it a knock or two and it sounded hollow not packed. So he checked the pressure. The water pressure from the street was 150 lbs. At the tank it was 180, the limit of his meter. Not good. Even if we had put a new tank in, it would have leaked.
So we decided to replace the pressure regulator valve. It was installed in the ceiling of the garage, which is well after the electronic valve for the watering system. That always bothered me because I knew the electronic valve can't handle 150 lbs. of pressure.
Jose agreed to put the new regulator below the electronic valve on the wall and install a new ball-joint valve with a handle to shut the water off without turning a little wheel. After he'd done that, the new regulator knocked the street pressure down from 150 to 70 and the pressure at the heater was 70, too.
An improvement. Now what about the leak? No leak. The drip? No drip? "You'll get another five years maybe out of that water heater," Jose told my mother as she slapped a credit card down on the $1,300 bill, which was $500 cheaper than Bay Area Water Heaters would have charged for a new water heater.
We'll see.
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I'M GOING BACK to the hospital in a few minutes before I go to my mother's to take out the garbage and check for a drip.
It will be nice to talk a little medicine instead of plumbing for a while.