Status report—and a shout-out to the nurses!

All is relatively good, health-wise. I have kicked the Vicodin habit, and slept through two nights without any pain pills at all. Well, not quite through—both nights I’ve woken up very suddenly with my heart beating a little fast and a strange anxious feeling in my legs that makes me need to kick them around. It’s very odd, and it takes a while to get back to sleep. Is this what withdrawal feels like? If so, I’m confused, because I thought it was more like Frank Sinatra screaming in a locked room and having his brow patted in The Man with the Golden Arm.

Speaking of brow-patters, damn but my home nurses have been wicked cool. Yesterday I picked up my last Bay Area drug delivery (unlike last week, the guy arrived at 2:30, just half an hour into the 2 till 5 window) and saw my nurse for the last time. I shed a silent tear, because Denise was great. She wrapped her thermometer in Saran wrap, in lieu of dedicated thermometer covers. She taught me how to take my own blood. And she dressed like a rock star—because she had been a bit of a rock star, and had funny stories about touring in Missoula, Montana, and her veggie bandmate asking for a garden burger at a cafe. (The waitress scoffed to a co-worker, “She may as well have asked for a piece-of-shit burger!”)

The home-care nurse in NYC, Brian, was also great, in a very different way. No rock star—just understated caustic humor. (Did I just imagine him suggesting that we dose our extra saline syringes with LSD and give them out at parties?)

And the PICC line nurse at UCSF was also fantastic, because he was able to insert my PICC line at my bedside, with minimal poking. Nothing like my first PICC line insertion. He was actually a little disappointed in himself, because he wasn’t able to do it on the first try, only the second, and he did something weird to a nerve, so that my middle finger felt all electric-shocky occasionally. But compared to the utter gouging I suffered on the first go-round, I was perfectly happy and thanked him profusely. The nerve thing went away eventually.

Speaking of PICC lines, it’s interesting to me that UCSF was completely copacetic with them, whereas all the docs and nurses in NYC seemed filled with fear whenever they looked mine. Just after I got mine inserted by the Butcher of Forest Hills, after I’d finished passing out and finally getting my blood pressure up again, the BoFH looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Be Very Careful. Always do this, then this [very confusing and rapid clamping and unclamping of tube, alternating with info about saline and heparin]. The nurses always screw it up!”

I was still dizzy, so I didn’t catch anything but “be scared of nurses.” So I was. And a lot of the nurses seemed to be scared of the PICC. At Manhasset, they had saline running through it constantly. At Mt. Sinai, I had to insist they use it, instead of the IV that was stuck in the crook of my other arm and stopped working if I bent my arm at all. And even the usually reasonable Dr. Gumprecht called the PICC “a loaded gun pointed straight at my heart.” Which it might be, but it’s better than the alternative, which is my heart getting eaten up by malevolent bacteria.

Which also reminds me that here in Cali, I get to use an “IV push,” which is a gigundo syringe that I just slowly push in over about 10 minutes—none of that drip business that takes half an hour and requires I sit very still and count drops.

But the coolest thing about my PICC line these days is that I can use it to draw my own blood. No needles. No having to arrange dates with nurses. Just take it and drop it at FedEx. It’s awesome. Thanks, Denise, and all you other rock-star nurses.