things are getting worse

Yesterday was a bad day. I did my morning infusions OK, waking up at 5 a.m. to start the first one. I'm taking Benadryl to counteract the reaction I have to the Vancomycin. Benadryl makes me sleepy. This makes it very hard to wake up in the morning.

I left work yesterday and immediately started my 5 o'clock infusion. I had planned with the nurse who was to come put in a midline to meet be a little after 6. He didn't show up 'til almost 7! I might as well have stayed at work. For some reason, I don't know what, it was important that both he and Mary, the nurse who started my peripheral line yesterday, both be there; she hasn't done a midline yet, which I was very surprised to hear.

Anyway, it did not go well. It felt to me like he went right through the vein - he couldn't get a blood return initially and once he did, he couldn't thread the catheter. Of course, there was no spare midline kit, so he couldn't give it a second try. So I go another 24 hours with the peripheral and hope my vein doesn't collapse around that. However, I've noticed the infusions go slower and slower and it is hard to flush the line. It is somewhat painful, too, when I do because I'm breaking through some small clot or I'm aggravating an already weakened vein. This has to get changed out tonight, either for a midline or another peripheral, I guess. It's only been two days and I'm already sick of nurses

I had some real issues with the male nurse's cleanliness and am going to call the agency this morning and ask that they send someone else this evening to place the midline. My biggest concern right now is being unable to start the evening's infusions if my peripheral goes bad.

My other problem is that these infusions are SLOW. Each one is supposed to take an hour, but really takes about an hour and fifteen minutes. Between work, infusions, and sleep, there is literally no time left for anything else. Including running. This is where having a resistance trainer for my bicycle would at least help me keep up the cardio, 'cause I can do that while on infusions.

Top all that frustration with my frustration at Apple and you get a broken keyboard. Yep, I broke my keyboard. While doing my infusions after the disastrous attempt at getting a midline last night, I was shocked to find that the recent upgrade to MobileMe reorganized my folders and my Saved emails seem to have disappeared. I went online trying to find an answer how to get them back (which folder to look for in Time Machine, maybe) and could not. The Apple servers were so slow that some Discussion pages wouldn't load at all. Trying to sign in was what sent me off when I couldn't get their servers to accept my login. Caps lock was NOT on. After smashing my hands down on the keyboard in frustration, I tried one more time and was able to log on - only to find that Discussions don't have a search utility! Or if they do, it isn't obvious and I haven't found it yet. They also don't have a discussion forum for Mail beside all the other Apple software forums - it's buried down in the OSX discussion forum.

Unable to search the forums and not having time to read every message header, I gave up. I did eventually find my Saved emails - they'd been put in a different folder that was closed. They're not gone, just moved. But I am pissed that the program would do that without notifying me and I'm pissed at Apple and I'm pissed at dirty nurses and I'm just pissed in general.