The Big Hospitalization: Day One...Half

Today was the first day of my long hospitalization (around two weeks, I think). Not much happened, other than my frustration with the television.

The problem is that when I came in before, for an overnight intro round of chemotherapy, my television worked primarily with a standard remote control. Now, though, I have to use that handset shaped like a back massager (not one used purportedly as that but actually works as an autoerotic vibrator for women). To anyone who's been hospitalized or visited someone in a hospital, he knows what I mean. That thing shaped broadly like a cross, with buttons controls the television, and delivers audio like a drive-in speaker that you hang inside your car. It comes, too, with a keyboard that can plug into it, but, as I learned from my first stay here at Northwestern, it doesn't really work. It plugs in and everything, but it is an ergonomic disaster. The keyboard is frustratingly small, and the cursor on the screen jumps around like a possessed Ouija board planchette.

So, I've given up on that piece of junk. Last time, it dominated my thoughts and turned me into an acerbic, pouting ball of anger. That was only over an overnight stay, and now I'll be here for around two weeks, so I've decided not to explode over an ineffective electronic controller. I'd like to spin off into a fugue state, but I'll learn to cope.

The only major thing that happened was an insertion of a PICC line in the crook of my right elbow. This dangling flipper will be the main line through which I'll receive the cytoxan, a form of chemotherapy I mentioned previously, and with which, as I've said, Ms. S. is quite familiar. I'm repeating myself, because I talked about PICC lines before, and this is more like the ultimately useless one I had when I was kindasortamaybe diagnosed with Lyme disease instead of multiple sclerosis.

So I had that inserted. I like the PICC line because its small plugs at the end/beginning of it serve as the main port through which things go in and come out, like blood. There was a funny moment when a nurse collected like six vials of my blood through one of these ports. What makes a PICC line so strange is that this happens without needles. The nurses simply plug and play. Six vials of blood filled up, unbeknownst to me, and I saw them resting on the bed before the nurse gathered them in her hands. I had felt nothing, but multiple tubes filled with my blood were on the end of my bed. I said to her something like, "Are you sure you got enough? I think my feet are hiding some blood, if you want." Then I thought that it felt like I was being drained, like some meanies do to a vampire, or several vampires, on True Blood. I was about to mention this observation, but the nurse was filling in for somebody else, so she had to hurry off to another patient's room. Oh well--there went another little opportunity to crack wise...

Then, though, two more medical personnel personalities (I don't know if either was a doctor, or if both were, or both were nurses) of (I'm going to guess here) Indian descent arrived to administer an antibiotic breathing treatment. I'm still not entirely sure what this was, and I was preoccupied as it was because the female one kept referring to it as a "prophylactic." Because of my limited medical vocabulary, I only think of condoms when I hear "prophylactic." Evidently, though, it means something specific that applied here. Whatever--to me a "prophylactic" is a condom.

The vapor that came out of the apparatus for this tasted very acidic, but the female doctor/nurse informed me of this and I was prepared with an arsenal of hard candy that I popped into my mouth to mask the bitterness. By the way, I had a moment of brief panic when I concentrated on the flavor of the vapor and concluded that it tasted like bitter almonds. I may have read too many Raymond Chandler novels, but I know that arsenic distinctively tastes like bitter almonds.

Before I thought about this too much, I realized that I couldn't contain my laughter and had to struggle to keep the mouthpiece in place because an old episode of The Simpsons was making me quiver. To all you young'ns out there, The Simpsons used to be funny back in the day, before it was infected by the pathetic attempts of humor that Harvard graduates churn out today.

That ended, and then I ate my dinner with my mother, my brother Ryan, and Anthony. Then I railed against Stephen King again because The Shawshank Redemption was on. King sucks, epically, but the film adaptations of his works--"works," I should say--are so much better than the shit he spews onto the page. This all goes back to my theory that great movie adaptations work for pieces of shit, and great works of literature are bound for failure as movies. Even No Country For Old Man works here. That is a great movie, but most Cormac McCarthy enthusiasts, like myself, know that that book was a only a middling novel of no intrinsic literary value.

Anyway, an hour ago I took an Ambien, to which I'm frustratingly immune, and now might try to sleep. I fear I won't, though, because the last time I had Ambien here, I was up all night. Maybe they'll up my dosage.

Or knock me out with propofol. Like Michael Jackson. Only, I'll be watched closely by qualified medical personnel. That is definitely, emphatically, not like Michael Jackson.

And tomorrow I get a real catheter (a penile one) and my first (second, really) big infusion of cytoxan, so wait for that...

R