This was it! Stent this morning, and hopes for good results and maybe home tomorrow.

The ants weren't a distraction, they were a harbinger.

For some reason they took a stool sample last night. This morning we found out there were traces of blood in it.

Oh, the explanation for the delay was reasonable: if James has polyps, they could be bleeding and causing the anemia. Worse, once the stents are in, it's a year of Plavix, a blood thinner, which will make polyps bleed. So instead of a stent today, he gets a colonoscopy tomorrow. And then maybe Monday, the stent.

I'm starting to wonder when they're going to check him for Dengue, Zika, and malaria, because they're apparently trying to get everything in.

James was, understandably, upset. I ended up grabbing a folded towel and slamming it repeatedly against one of the storage shelves. I wanted to kick something, but I would have only hurt myself.

My efforts to make the afternoon pass quickly turned into a goose egg. First I tried to play some DVDs on the USB player, but I only have the "Mouse" here, and it won't power the player. Tried watching The Good Life on YouTube and the videos were playing out of order. So, hey, we have Acorn TV and we haven't seen season eight of Murdoch Mysteries! I called up Acorn TV and it quit streaming after five minutes. We are so sick of TV we can barely stand it--it's like a never-ending stream of Law & Order: Criminal Intent--and we don't get any good channels here like Science or HGTV. Should have said yes to the stents at Northside.

He did take a long nap while I finished Radio Girls, which I really enjoyed, and after that we went to look up his previous test results on Kaiser's websit. Well, son of a -----! They are right: his BUN and his creatitine have risen steadily since last August, and his BUN jumped from 35 in December to 60 in April. So tell me--why didn't anyone say anything about this? Especially when he is seeing his GP every three months. I am so pissed I am nearly speechless.

After supper tonight I have decided I shall retire from CDC and start campaigning for proper food in hospital cafeterias rather than the rubbish they serve. I can't believe hospital cafeterias today. At least Piedmont has a decent Au Bon Pain with good chicken soup rather than a dreadful McDonald's like Northside. St. Joe's and Fatima in the 1960s wouldn't have stood for stuff like they serve now: big fat slices of pizza at 660 calories. Fried chicken. Nice plain baked stuff like chicken legs and pork chops drowned in thick sauces. Meat loaf topped in icky ketchup (James likes his with brown gravy). Too-salty soups. Just because you have to serve things "army style" doesn't mean you have to make it as unpalatable, unhealthy, and fattening as possible. People want barbecue or other sauce? Serve it on the side. Provide salt packets next to the soups. James pointed out that a chicken breast cooked in teriyaki sauce has a different taste from a chicken breast with a teriyaki sauce on it, and he's perfectly correct. But you don't come to a hospital for haute cuisine, and I resent having had to eat perfectly nice baked chicken tonight drowning in a thick teriyaki sauce or a nice broiled pork chop like last week at Northside doused in barbecue sauce.

So James has Draino delivered to him and has to drink it, four now and four more at four a.m. And tomorrow at eight he gets scoped, and then they'll probably tell him he has Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

Labels: health, sickness

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 6:31:00 PM

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