Rebel Rev is keeping her sense of humour

Hi everyone,

I hope you are well and coping with the heat. My hospital room is nice and toasty at 31c. I keep the light off and have two fans going continuously. It is very hard sitting on a plastic chair and sleeping on a rubber mattress. Thank goodness my sister Dawn got me a chill pillow that I keep in the fridge till I settle at night. It stays cool for about 40 mins. Bliss. 

Yesterday I had a dreadful day. I couldn’t get off the loo and I ended up with a blinding headache so much so that I couldn’t even speak to poor Maggie when she came. The night nurse, who knows me, took one look at me and took some action. She knew it’s not in my nature to lie in bed and not talk. She managed to get some IV meds into me so that I could eventually settle and sleep. 

My day today started at 6am when my lovely night nurse gave me some medicine down my NJ tube as it’s become too hard for me to swallow all those tablets. I went back to sleep and then 20 mins later woke up to throw up. There’s nothing in my stomach so I’m just puking bile. It’s awful and really stings your throat. Fortunately the NJ tube places the medicine lower down and bypasses my stomach so at least I have a chance to absorb some of it. 

I’m still on TPN. They are slowly weaning that down and increasing the NJ feed. The problem is I’m not tolerating the feed well and when that’s connected is when I have to run to the loo. I can’t go home on TPN but I can go home with the NJ feeds so we have to pray that my system starts absorbing some of the nutrients. 

One of the problems of it going through me so quickly is I’m still having to have everything replaced. I’ve had a top up of magnesium which is awful and makes you feel really hot and rough and I also needed potassium. My albumin is low so I’ve got a lot of fluid retention. 

They are still not sure when I can go home and are looking at other ways to stabilise the situation. 

One of the hardest things is being permanently attached to Eric the cyclops. Image this scenario. It’s 3am. You wake up and know you have a very short time to get to the loo before things get messy. You want to make a dash for it. The problem is you have to unplug 3 pumps and drag Eric with you avoiding the table and the fan. Oh my days there have been some near misses.  With that lovely thought in mind I shall leave you to the refreshing rain and thunder. Hope you have a lovely weekend.