11 October 2021
It was sunny when Joyce and I took a walk around the block this morning. There was an autumn chill in the air but it was still pleasant.
At noon the Kevin, the new RN, arrived in his white BMW and took Joyce's vital signs. He went through Cat the Physician's Assistant's notes on Joyce's wound care and was just about to take down the dressing when Salwa arrived.
I had requested that they both be here for the first dressing change to see what Dr. Tong had set up. And they both did come. And they were both glad the other was there before it was all over. It's a monster of a dressing and it took two of them and some cheerleading from me to get through it.
Cat had warned them that pulling the black foam out would be painful. Joyce had taken Oxycodone an hour before but she was still screaming as Kevin took the foam out and Salwa poured sterile water onto the foam to soften it.
Then the fun began. Kevin covered the wound in Lidocaine while Salwa cut the black foam to fit. "The muscle, too," I reminded Kevin. Then he applied the petroleum-based dressing that makes removal of the black foam a bit easier if impeding tissue growth. With the black foam in the wound, the next trick was to build a foam bridge to the lily pad that attaches the suction tube from the Wound VAC to the dressing.
The one catch to wrapping a bridge of foam from the wound around to the front of her thigh to attach the lily pad is that the foam can not touch her skin directly. So they had to close the wound dressing first, then roll Joyce on her side and then put a layer of drape directly on her skin before laying the foam bridge over it.
After the lily pad was attached, there was more drape to seal the whole thing before they attached the VAC and tried to get suction. It took a minute but it sealed. And everyone stopped sweating.
Actually we all worked together pretty well. But it's a tough dressing. Salwa looked at me and said she's going to need my hands on Wednesday. It's really a two-person job.
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JUST A FEW MINUTES after they left, having spent a full hour here, Joey and Michael arrived on their way to the airport from a Mill Valley wedding.
It was really nice to see them and catch up for a few hours.
They brought cheese, crackers, cold cuts and olives with a bottle of wine and we threw in a bottle of prosecco and a few espressos as we talked about everyone, their new jobs, the friends they had just caught up with and Joyce's saga.
We even wished Mary a happy 69th birthday, if a day late.
Then they were off to the airport and we got busy making a spaghetti dinner with calamata olives and pork sausage ground into a red sauce with mushrooms. Hearty.
But it was almost therapeutic compared to the stress of the dressing change.
Can't wait until Wednesday. We warned Salwa that now her 15 minutes visits are going to take an hour she'll have to come up with some longer stories to amuse us. All she had today was that somebody had called her a "married broad" already. Not your husband, I checked. No! she confirmed.
Ah, married life. Full of little surprises.