We are at the point where days have begun to blend into one another. I discover that I can hardly remember last week except it short, staccato memories of bright lights, trundling medical data carts, faces of nurses and doctors all in a jumble. The hours when I am at home with the fids is the only constant I can rest reality on. Otherwise it is that vision you get when walking into a strange place with a strong sense of dread, and a feeling of disconnection.

We are moved over to Piedmont now and although everyone is nice, the service seems more impersonal. The room has a higher ceiling, so it is less claustrophobic, but is laid out awkwardly, with the sink in the room and often blocked with James' IV pole when I get done using the bathroom.  No curtain to dress behind, no soft light in the bathroom. It is either dark or painfully bright, and the A/C is either arctic or sahara-like. James is nearly at the end of a long, long corridor filled with other heart patients, and there are two other wings just like it. It's a major hike to the cafeteria, which is good for my own cardiac health, but the food is uniformly too salty. I intend to check out the Au Bon Pain nearer his room today.

We saw the doctor's (which doctor? we don't know; we were just told Dr. Brooke [sp?]—doctors do not come and go in our room like they did at Northside and it's very like living incommunicado) nurse practitioner, who told us he will be to see us between his surgeries. In the meantime I have been home and have Tucker's dish next to me getting him to eat and Snowy is singing to my left, and I am so sleepy it is unbelievable—James' bed, he says, is much more comfortable, but I'm sleeping on this chair that pulls out into a bed that slants downward, and me going with it. James has sent me home for his duvet cover because the blankets are so hard and heavy, first cousins to those 200-pound duvets we met on vacation last year.

Labels: birds, dogs, health, pets, sickness

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:09:00 AM

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