Friday evening, late night and early Saturday morning hours crawled at a snail’s pace. There is a seemingly non-stop flow of hospital med people coming in checking for any signs of improvement in my pain level while checking the flow of my vital antibiotic IV drip. They have been constantly lifting my no-modesty “gown” to monitor the bullet hole ugly appearance of the G tube’s much infected entry point through my abdomen to my stomach. It is impossible for the doctors to know exactly what bacteria is attacking me because it can take up to 48 hours for the Lab to grow a culture from a sample of the inflection discharge. Because of that, they are feeding me two very strong antibiotics to cover all the bases. To keep these meds flowing, I am getting a constant drip of saline solution with Potassium Chloride that serves to keep me hydrated at the same time.
I am so exhausted from all the hours of sleep lost over the past two weeks because of this pain. Things are not much different here except that the hospital bed with all of its adjustments allows me to fine tune my position to one that brings the least amount of pain. With that comfort comes waves of sleep and no sleep that makes the hours roll past in a blur of non-memorable rounds of questioning from hospital staff, trying to eat, dragging my IV pole of meds into the bathroom, etc.
