143) Sphyghettiometer Tentacles

July 5, 2007
Thursday

El Milagro: I walk in and say hi to Jennifer the Dietician, who waves from her phone call. Seems late, even though I’m on time. I say hi to John and ask how he’s doing and he finally says “Okay” now and I wonder if he is just saying that or if he is doing better. He strikes me as a person who is up front with things, so I trust he is doing better and that makes me feel good because I want this center to be successful with folks.

Gladys cannulates me. I read my book and listen to NPR on my radio. Watch the start of the news on ABC and then fall asleep… news must’ve been boring. What else could happen?

Later I wake up and half-watch (with no sound but looking at the picture) the “Ugly Betty” show because I am tangled in my flipper TV control mechanism and can’t aim it at the box. Now we have flipper control boxes that are wired to the wall, so they can fall on the floor and we can pull them up by their tails (very helpful). When we arrive they hang over the back of the chair like sleeping cobras with pimples. They have speakers so people don’t have to use earphones if they’re rude and don’t mind bothering their neighbors with the low rumble of noisy TV rabble spitting out all over the place.

Or, we can plug our own earphones into them and make them even more tentacley and then they wrap themselves around our BP monitor cord and pretty soon we find ourselves tied tightly to our chairs in wires and hoses. And in my case tonight this conglomeration is further complicated by the blood red tubes that cross over me from a left-arm access to a right-sided dialysis machine and the whole thing feels like being a meatball in the middle of a bowl of spaghetti. Tonight I have become a meatball with arms and I can’t adjust the TV without yanking my tubes and stretching my sphyghettiometer hose.

It might as well be a sphyghettiometer hose (instead of a sphygmomanometer* hose) tonight since it, in combination with my earphones wire, holds my head down as I try to get up to give Gladys a standing BP. "ARGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH…" I am trapped in my dialysis chair! I pull off the head phones, yank on the BP hose, and slowly pull myself up, like Gulliver escaping the naugahyde hills. I am up and out of the spaghetti. I guess I digressed here a little in this description… since I know Gladys didn’t notice my struggling to freedom from the chair. My fantasies add some adventure to the otherwise doll drum of dialyis tonight.

Oh well, another day another dialysis. So it goes.

Notes: In at 75.8 and out at 72.5 Kgs.
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* Blood pressure monitor (sphygmomanometer) (nd) Retreived online July 2007 from How Products are Made, http://www.madehow.com/Volume-1/Blood-Pressure-Monitor.html