270) The Yakky Tech

August 19, 2008
Tuesday

El Milagro: The big clouds are coming in from the west. Here the sky is still clear, but over in West Austin there is a black bank of rain coming this way. It's gonna unload anytime and I think of Shayna home alone in the storm. I scoot in from the parking lot and find the door to the treatment room locked again. I sit and pull out my Bush book... read for about 20 minutes til I get tired of waiting and sneak in as someone comes out... feeling like a neighbor's sneaky cat I once knew that would zip into the house as quick as a flash when someone opened the door. Then we'd have to chase him around while he tried to hide behind the drapes or under a couch. I zip in and wander around looking for my chair.

I find my chair and Carrie the Tech checks my BP. Rick the Tech sits down beside my chair and is yaking away while preparing to swab my arm. I ask, "Have you stuck me before?" and he acknowledges that he has and then he goes on, asking about if I've been to any good restaurants in the last week... what's my book about... what is a 'neo-con'... and continues to yak on about his definition of a 'fact', etc. Meanwhile he nonchalantly goes thru the poking process and before I can focus on what he is doing versus what he is saying, I spot that his needle stick doesn't look right.

"I do one up, one down" I blurt out. He looks up as he slides the needle into the fistula, quiping, "It's too late now!" He quickly notices the frown on my face and adds, "Its okay... it really doesn't matter..." to which I reply, "It matters to me. I always for the past two years have had one up one down." His smile disappears and he apologizes and tries to return to small talk. I'm in my head adding up all the halucinations I have about why I don't really like this new guy. He's too friendly; he doesn't focus on his tech work (with me); he is absent-mindedly teching me while yaking away about whateve crosses his mind. Maybe it is an attempt on his part to build rapport with patients. I think that if he would observe other techs he would see that when they are at the business of setting us up they focus on their work, not visiting... which, in fact, Carrie is doing with my machine while he is yaking. Maybe I'm just in a mood today... and want to be left to myself as I enter into another blood cleansing session.

Dr. Rowder comes up for one of his 'drive-bys' as Rick is yaking, and I turn my attention to him and his cadre of little assistants. He reports that he is changing shifts and so there will be a new doctor doing drive bys in September. He is suggesting that 'they' (the Doc's practice) will again be changing all of us to a new doctor weather we want one or not). I reply that I'll stick with Moritz. He introduces a new PA and suggests that she will be doing these walk-arounds too. The new dietician, whose name I forget, and who dresses 9 times dressier than Jennifer (this one has high heels that look like shiny extra-pointy alligators... regular high heels that look like someone grabbed the toe with a pair of pliers and stretched it out an extra two inches to a sharp point) and shows me my lab results which are good (Rowder calls my clearance "Excellent") except for my phosphorous going back up again (from 4.9 to 5.9). She scowls cutely at me and I shrug and guess that it has to do with cheese or something... Rowder asks, "enchiladas in Laredo?" and I reply that I haven't seen an enchilada in years... "No... it is probably nachos or snacks at the conference that week". We all agree that I will do better next time.

They move on and I settle in to setting the TV muted on the weather channel to watch the storm come over, hook my earphones up to NPR, and start reading my Bush book. I am getting bored with this book, and yet I continue with it to avoid reading my texts for the semester. As usual, I switch over to the ABC News at 5:30...

I fall asleep sometime and snooze thru the rest of my session... waking up in time for Carrie to unhook me and let me go back into my life. So it goes.

Notes: In at 76.8 kgs and out at 74.5 kgs.