My CF friends and me

It is now Tuesday morning and I’m in the IV room for what should be my fourth last course of Caspofungin. I should be done on Friday and, if so, Saturday will be the first day that I will not have had to be at this hospital since March 11^th. It is a big week. It is National Organ and Tissue Awareness week so I hope everyone is wearing their green ribbons and signing their organ donor cards. What makes this week truly exciting is that the last member of my CF transplant support group of three is having a live-donor transplant TODAY. As I am typing this right now, waiting for the IV drug they forgot to order (it’s been an HOUR, JEEZ), Deanna is in surgery. Her uncle and her brother have each lovingly offered up a lobe of their lung so that she has this wonderful chance at this goo-free life.

The nurses at the Edmonton clinic know about our little trio. I’ve been open with them about how we are friends and the greatest support group of all time – myself, Sandra Smith and Deanna Christopher. It really does not please them that we associate freely. In the past week, both Deanna and I have received the same lecture that we should NOT be visiting each other for the first three months and really shouldn’t see each other for at least a year after transplant. Oh, we can be friends over email and over the phone, but they deeply frown over personal contact between CF friends. I find this interesting and odd. Sure, I understand the principle – germs are bad and we are immune-suppressed, we cultivate different things in our lungs and could possibly infect each other. However, I am forced to spend at least 4 hours a day at a hospital where greasy, yellow-gowned people roll themselves around common areas with their protective masks around their necks. I go to the physio gym every day where pre- and post-transplant patients share space and exercise equipment. It’s funny to think that three people with savage mutual respect and awareness of personal space and germability, are forbidden to associate with each other at a point when we need each other the most. So we still visit, we just make sure we maintain a safe distance, don’t cough on each other, wash hands frequently and limit any open-mouth kissing. The only things we share are fries and hand-sanitizer.

I wasn’t one for having CF friends growing up. I was diagnosed later in life and never had the opportunity to forge any connections with fellow sickies. The year before I was diagnosed, they ceased the annual CF CAMPS, where I gather kids got together and did physio, ate food and made friends. Apparently they realised that having a bunch of sick kids in close quarters meant that they could easily spread germs and contaminate each other… (ok, Edmonton nurses, I get it but you’re still not gonna stop me from hanging out with D and S), so I went without having a real CF friend until I went online and joined a CF chat group in my second year of University. After I posted something pithy on a message board, I got an email response from a girl named Katie in Arkansas. We immediately had so much in common, she was younger than me by two days and I was so amazed at how similarly we saw the world and how much we had in common that we both abandoned the weirdos at the chat group and just became vigilant pen pals.

I love Katie as a sister, she has been such a huge force of support in my life. The hardest part about having to go forward with transplant was having to go on without having Katie there to relate to. It was scary for both of us but she has stuck by me and supported me as best she could. We finally met face to face after an 8-year friendship this spring when she flew to Calgary so we could celebrate our 29^th birthdays together. I took her to Banff, where of course it was snowing in June… Sigh… But it was on Banff that day that I realised that I could no longer stroll about freely without wearing oxygen. She was there the day I had to sport the plastic tube and walk down the street because I just couldn’t hide it anymore. She helped make it ok.

My Calgary CF clinic likes to play matchmaker when it comes to huge events in CF life – like getting feeding tubes or ports or transplants. I did manage to make friends with one girl in CF clinic over the years, a girl named Amanda, who was the first person I actually knew to undergo transplant. When I was in Hawaii, a few months before I started getting sick, Amanda was in Edmonton getting new lungs. I was obsessively following her progress over Facebook, not knowing that I was months away from having to face that reality myself. Through CF clinic, I met Shauna, who is a beacon of understanding and positivity. I love her no-bullshit approach when it comes to talking about transplant, she told me that being afraid of transplant was silly because I could either go on, as is, suffering for years until the end or I go through with it and you either die on the table and it’s over or you get a whole new life. I somehow felt instantly better about moving forward with transplant and she’s been a source of sage advice ever since.

One day, however, Jeanette, our delightful pharmacist asked me if I wouldn’t mind meeting a girl who was about to start her six-week physio program in Edmonton, as I had just recently finished mine and it would be good for her to have someone who had just been through it in case she had any questions. So that is how Deanna and I were introduced. She was small and had that feisty CF spirit that I so identify with. We started emailing daily and one day she sent out a larger email to me, the aforementioned Amanda and a girl named Sandra who was also awaiting transplant. Sandra emailed me back to introduce herself and before we knew it, we had a three-way Facebook message where we spoke daily about living life waiting for transplant. The instant comfort and understanding was amazing. Suddenly, I felt less alone in the world, despite the fact that I was rapidly becoming a recluse. I could talk to these girls about anything and everything and they understood things in a way that no one else in my life really could. Oh, and I also wanted to give a shout-out to Travis, because you are hilarious and awesome.

Anyway, this loving ode is to my CF friends. It is because of your love and support that I have been able to find the strength to survive the transplant train, two dry runs and one very successful surgery.

 I can’t wait for Deanna’s hard part to be over; it’s pretty nice on this side of things.  I can’t wait for us to all be living lives as normal girls (who happen to take a lot of pills and are no longer allowed to lick doorknobs). I can’t wait to see what the future holds for us and our very patient support people who have sacrificed so much to get us to this point.

A brief history lesson in Carly

I know the longer I put this off, the harder it is just going to be so I’m going to have to just jump right in and go fer it…

I need a clever title for this chapter but here is a brief history of the past two plus years of my life. Maybe I’ll go back a little further for clarification.

I was born in Calgary, Alberta on June 1^st, 1981. I was the second of my parent’s four children and I have been told that I am the only child to have been planned and arguably the biggest genetic failure, haha. Thank you, surprise double-recessive disease that went undiagnosed until a month before my 14^th birthday. Anyway, I grew up relatively normal but I was always keenly aware that there was something amiss about my health; I coughed, there was goo, I was always being taken to doctors. Finally my mom found the right specialist who administered a simple and painless test that gave us the answer. Cystic Fibrosis. I was devastated because I had always secretly hoped that there would be a simple fix to what ailed me and I would be a normal girl like everyone else. Instead, I found out at 13 that I had a life-expectancy of 32 and my future felt a little grim.

The good news was that my particular mutation of the disease didn’t involve the horrid pancreatic symptoms that cause so much grief to my fellow CFers. I avoided a life of enzymes but still had to deal with my fair share of infectious goo and coughing that made quiet classrooms and sleepovers with friends really uncomfortable. I still tried to keep up with the kids and play sports, I really only quit playing Varsity basketball because I was terrible at it but my real talents in life were really writing and being adorably sarcastic and bitchy so I focused on honing those skills instead.

I never wanted to let CF hold me back from doing everything I wanted to do so, despite my parent’s best efforts to keep me closer to home, I moved across the country to go to University. It wasn’t long after graduation, maybe a year, that my doctor sat me down and told me that, numerically, my lung function was not good and that I was at an advanced/severe stage of my disease and it was time to start having the talk about future lung transplantation.

I had a bit of a nervous breakdown after that. I had just finished school and was on the precipice of starting my life and he wanted to have a discussion about the end. In my mind, because I was diagnosed so late and because I wasn’t sick very often and because my pancreas worked that I was one of the special ones that would beat the odds and not have to face this reality until well into my 30s or 40s. It wasn’t so much delusion or an inflated sense of importance, more so a basic need for self-preservation, a coping method that allowed me to live my life without being limited by my disease.

So instead of having that transplant meeting I moved to Hawaii for six months. I think my parents knew that I had some living I needed to get out of my system and were delightfully accommodating in letting me waste my talents by living at their house, working menial jobs between jaunts to Hawaii, the Bahamas, Africa and Paris. I’m so grateful for that because I couldn’t imagine wasting those years in some cubicle under fluorescent lights, hoping the guy next to me doesn’t get too grossed out by my coughing over his morning doughnut and double-double.

Here is where the real adventure began. I had been living in Hawaii with Ian for a month and a half just before Christmas of 2008. I wasn’t feeling well and was losing weight. We flew home and I immediately went to my doctor and was admitted to the hospital over the holidays. They let me out for Christmas but I had to go back shortly after. On New Years day, my doctor asked me if I would allow his protégé to do my discharge from the hospital so that he could get some practice in and the little fella came in and threw the book at me. Telling me that it was time I moved forward with transplant and that I needed oxygen at all times and I needed a feeding tube, which was a lot of information to handle in one go. I don’t really want to relive that day because it was arguably one of the worst in my life. I’m so grateful that my motherly physiotherapist Julie was there to help calm me and clear the room when I started to hyperventilate. I left the hospital that night to find a large oxygen machine in my house. Ian and I ate Chinese food with my parents and I cried myself to sleep.

Two days later I had to pull myself together to face my extended family at my cousin’s wedding. I have the most delightfully loving and supportive extended family and friends who helped me to pull through the next two plus years as my oxygen needs grew and my willingness to face the outside world disappeared. I was never in denial about the situation but I never fully took to my new situation. I couldn’t bear the thought of wearing oxygen in public and having my disability being so glaringly obvious to the outside world. I need to be sick in private and being a 20-something girl with a plastic tube across her face and a tank strapped to her shoulder, doesn’t do much to enhance one’s self-esteem. If I went out, it was for short trips only and the oxygen was in the car. I think it was because I grew up a shy kid. It took me a really long time to be able to walk proudly and stare people down who were giving me funny eyes. Wearing the oxygen in public robbed me of my ability to walk proudly, I turned in to that  insecure child all over again (if you want to get all psychological about things.)

A brief timeline of my transplant journey…

December 2008 – Bad news day on New Year’s Eve

March 2009 – Initial meeting with my CF clinic – Dr. Rabin and social worker Aimee to discuss what was to come.

September 2009 – First meeting with Edmonton where I met the delightful Dr. Kapasi for the first time. It was basically a question and answer session where I committed to a week of extensive testing.

December 2009 – Testing/torture week in Edmonton where I was bled, scanned, x-rayed, cathed, bronched  – you name it. Generally unpleasant but I learned a lot and met with many of the Edmonton team.

March – May 2010 – Six week physio program where I got in shape and met some interesting fellow transplanters. Generally, patients are actively listed at this point but I put it off so that I could get my wisdom teeth out and finish some vaccinations. It is highly possible that I was just dragging my feet because I wasn’t really ready yet.

August 9^th 2010 – Officially listed as actively seeking body parts. On this day, Sandra and Deanna and I met for the first time as a threesome (we had been emailing for months, but I’ll talk more about that later).

January 7^th 2011 – I got my FIRST CALL for lungs, which ended in a dry run. Don’t worry, we will be talking about that later….

February 6^th 2011- I got my SECOND CALL for lungs. Dry run… Apparently two dry runs are pretty rare. Lucky me.

March 11^th – I kept hearing ‘third time’s a charm…’ Guess they were right because this call was a go.

And now we are all caught up….

Week five draws to a close...

It's already Thursday and I'm in the IV room once again with Lauren and mom. Lauren likes to pass her time doing the crossword puzzles from the free newspaper in the hallway and our time basically consists of her reading out the question and me telling her the answer. It's like playing Jeopardy except her mustache is far less impressive than Trebeck's.

I've had a good week so far. My energy level is getting better every day and I'm starting to recognize that I'm actually full and need to stop shoveling the food in to my gullet before I get to that uncomfortable, immobile-for-an-hour state. Good signs. I saw one of the doctors on Thursday and they took out the rest of my staples, as I'm sure you heard me shouting from the rooftops or saw on Facebook or saw my smokesignals. I finally got to wear a bra for the first time in a month and I feel so delightfully human again that I'm downright gleeful. It might be a side-effect from the medication, for I have never been known to be filled with glee.

The good doc told me that I'm doing as well as I could possibly be. No issues to be concerned with, I'm healing very well. I did an x-ray on Monday because one of the other docs was concerned that he heard fluid around my lungs but they turned out to be clear and also, the pocket of air that has been floating around my chest cavity since surgery has decreased in size by more than half. I got a peek at my x-ray and saw the clips and wires that will forever be holding my chest cavity together after the whole 'breaking of my sternum' thingy. If I hear one more joke about setting off metal detectors.... I'll just smile politely and go, 'haha, yeah,' once again.

I did read Lauren's journal this week and I was tearing up in my Cheerios by the end of the first page. It's hard to think back to that time of waking up and feeling scared and helpless. It's hard to know that my family could do nothing but be scared and helpless along with me only they were far more conscious about what was going than I was. I will tell you about waking up in ICU in my next blog. Right now I'm talking about week five.

So, good week, doing well, no staples, bra... All caught up. Yesterday I did have an unfortunate interaction with my physio student Jacob. Now at a certain time of year, the hospital gets an influx of students so the physiotherapists can ignore the patients and force you to deal with fresh-faced, awkward 20-somethings with minimal hands-on training. They learn fast and I don't need a lot of coaching because I used to be such a fantastic athlete (bahahahaaha) so I don't mind so much. I find Jacob generally delightful, polite and enthusiastic. He is from Vancouver and loves watching sports on the TV, he lets me swear and make fun of him so we get along well. Until yesterday... I was doing some leg exercise and while he watched I was told him that I had no idea what to do with my hands and made an Alec Baldwin ‘I need two coffee cups’ joke that went over his head. So that kicked off a conversation about television, he asked me what I watched and I told him of my love for Community, 30 Rock, Modern Family, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – none of which he had ever seen. He then told me that his favourite show is Two and a Half Men and I was instantly disgusted to the point where I could no longer look at him. He tried to justify it but failed miserably. So I brought up how there are some solid adult cartoons and he replied ‘yeah, like Family Guy.’ Double Fail Jacob. I don’t know how I will be able to work with this kid from here on out.

It is now Saturday. I had a bit of an exhausting week for no reason whatsoever. I did do some light shopping to fill my bag with mini-hand sanitizers and sought out some new running shoes. (I am still wearing the old Addidas ones I bought in first-year University. They are still like new but maybe it’s time to upgrade to something from this decade.)

I met with the nurse coordinator yesterday to get a spirometer to measure my lung function daily at home. I learned a lot from her in that meeting, she is a no-nonsense kinda gal and gave me the scary statistics about rejection and told me about how many times the site where the lung is attached can fail and the lung can just fall if it is not healing properly. It was interesting and intimidating but I told her it took me two years to actually be ready for transplant and I have no intention of messing around. We transplant patients, we are asked to keep a daily journal of our blood pressure, PFTs, weight and temperature. She told me that they can tell when people just fill it in the day before and they just laugh when they see it because ‘you don’t do this for us, I don’t love you, we are here to treat you and keep you as healthy as possible and it’s up to you.’ I really appreciated that. I am very scared and intimidated by this new routine of medication. I don’t want my lungs to just fall off one day but I am still not at the point where I am scared enough of the world where I don’t want to hug my friends and family without haz-mat suits and aside from the obsessive hand-washing, which, quite frankly, I have always done, I still feel very much like me – with a chubbier face.

So, quiet weekend planned. I fully intend to catch up on some emailing and maybe throw up a few more blog postings while my brain is feeling alert and my hands aren’t too shaky, so prepare yourselves for my self-indulgent cries for attention.

Memoirs of a Transplant. Part two...

And so we begin week five…

It’s Monday morning and the IV room is filled with sleepy people in warm blankets. I have the urge to put a mirror under the old lady’s mouth in front of me because she looks like the crypt keeper but maybe she’s just really tired.

I feel like I should continue my story in chronological order but my memories from that week are sporadic, chemically altered and most likely imaginary. My lovely and dutiful sister Lauren is coming up today to spend the week with me. She was the one who stayed at the hospital all night with mom, stalking the dark halls and flagging down nurses for updates. My dear bleeding heart sister is a very sensitive girl and is easily traumatized; just ask her about the time she gave me a bleeding nose on the neighbour’s trampoline when we were kids. She is still haunted by it, but she saw me being wheeled from the OR, all pale and hands curled up and I am told that she had an epic panic attack the first time she saw me in ICU. Always trying to steal my thunder, that one…

Oh right, my point is that Lauren took a very vigilant journal of what went on in those fuzzy days. She wrote everything down; things that happened, how I looked, funny things that were said, right down to what movie was playing on TV when I woke up after surgery (Crocodile Dundee 2, I believe). I want to give it a read to jog my drug-addled memory.

I just remembered that I packed my IPOD today. Thank god. I really feel for nurses, some folks just can’t get enough of talking about their health problems to strangers. I actually packed my IPOD so that I could ignore the physio student who is forced to follow me around at the gym. He’s lovely but I can be trusted to count to 10 three times by myself. Plus, I don’t give a shit about baseball so we don’t have much to talk about and I spend most of my time saying things to make him feel uncomfortable for my own amusement.

Today’s topic is what life is like in week five. It’s been a month since I have been breathing with my new lungs. I am still getting used to them, we are still in the process of getting to know each other. As excited as the promise of this new life is, the process has also been a mourning period for me. I’ve never been defined by my CF, I have always been one to feel like it’s better to be sick in private and never really let people watch me do meds or physio before, but when you grow up with chronic illness, you really learn to know and understand your body. I woke up after surgery covered in gauze and tape and stitched and staples with tubes sticking out of every direction. It wasn’t a body I recognized and am still struggling to understand. My old body and I, despite my mutinous lungs, were well in-tuned and had a certain rhythm. The cough, the goo, all of my old trademarks are now gone (although I hear that my famous sleep moaning remains to a certain extent, so I'm excited about that). 

I am also mourning my scar-free body. The one genetic blessing I was endowed with was being a skinny girl with big knockers. On my first two dry runs I got the ONE surgeon who performs the surgery with the sternal (vertical) incision. I wanted what is known in the medical community as the CLAM SHELL. They basically cut you right under your breasts, so, theoretically, with enough vitamin E and a wide enough band, I could still wear a bikini. Unless I get all fat from all the delicious fried foods I've been eating... (I apologize for the inappropriateness of this paragraph.) But Dr. Ken Stewart gave me my transplant dream, my scar allows me to keep living life as a secret sick person. 

I was lucky enough to keep transplant-related diabetes at bay (it's common for transplant patients and even moreso for CF patients to develop diabetes for short term or ever), so that makes me very happy because I'm still working on that lifetime supply of Fun Dip my sister gave me last Christmas.

IPOD just paid off, Lady Random Talker just sucked my mother in. HAHAHAHAHA. Apparently she was trying to get my attention by saying "Hello? Hello? (my mother's back is to her) Is your daughter blogging?" Just looking for an in to find out what is wrong with me so she has an excuse to talk about yourself. Seriously, you know you're going to be there for a while, bring some busywork...

I haven’t made an exact count of my new pill regiment but if I had to estimate, I would say I take about 4 trillion pills a day. Or not.  I’ll count during physio when I’m tearing it up on the treadmill and get back to you. I counted this evening, I take 40 pills a day plus one to sleep plus two inhaled treatments per day. I should be dropping that number by one tomorrow. Hopefully that also lessens my ravenous appetite and chubby cheeks...

So new body is being regulated by a whole smack of pills for blood pressure, anti-ulcers, anti-rejections, anti-fungals, antibiotics, stomach motility, sleeping, there are steroids, vitamins, supplements – thankfully they have stopped feeding me all those friggen laxatives and water pills and general potty area pills – those were not fun weeks. I have officially resigned my body to Western Medicine, my dreams of being a healthy organic (yet well groomed) hippie with a toxin-free body are long dead. I’m all toxin, baby. Things will get better in time. One month in, I'm always hungry, my hands shake from time to time, deep sleep only comes chemically and my cheeks are a bit chubby. But hey, no more hiding my tubeface from the world...

I just remembered I had a blog...

It's early Saturday morning and I am comfortably reclined in the outpatient IV room at the hospital for my daily dose of Caspofungin. Paper cup of tea, just ate an astronaut's breakfast of pills and I have another hour to go before I do the 'walk of temptation' past the hospital cafeteria and ogle the daily pizza selection. It's a miserable lot in this room today, or maybe it's just my inner snob being judgemental at the holey-socked miscreant and his homely girlfriend or the too-loud ladies with their dirty shoes on the chairs or the glaringly annoying number of people who are unable to obey the abundant 'CHAIRS ARE FOR PATIENT USE ONLY' signs. Sigh.

There is a point to this rant, I'm sure. Four weeks ago at this very time I was in surgery. Four weeks exactly since Dr. Ken Stewart was wrist-deep in my chest cavity playing switcharoo with my organs. I wonder if they play music while they operate like they do in the movies. I wonder what my soundtrack was... The good news is that, judging by my aforementioned rant, I appear to have come out the other side with my spirit intact and my personality still on the adorably gritty side.

I still have a ways to go with the IV so hold on to your hats, we have a lot of catching up to do.

It's been a productive week, my first week out of the hospital as an ordinary citizen again. I did a three week stint in the hospital; the first week was a haze of invasiveness and strong narcotics of which I remember very little, the second was far more pleasant thanks to the kindness of nurses but still heavy on pain which I spent in a state of epic stoniness to keep from ripping the chest tubes out and running for my life, the last week was a kind of slow torture, just waiting for one final chest tube to stop draining so that I could be set free in to the world once again. This week, my first week of freedom, of real showers and real beds and television and internet, has been rejuvenating. PLUS yesterday I had 32 staples removed from my chest. Sounds impressive but that was only half of them. The other half come out next week, then I'm just a PICC line away from being able to blend amongst the gentiles once again.

So I forget how to write a little, bear with me as my story structure is non-linear. YOU WILL READ WHATEVER I DECIDE TO TELL YOU IN THE ORDER THAT I DECIDE because this is the IV room and I am just trying to keep busy to keep from screaming WHY DO YOU PEOPLE THINK THAT RULES DO NOT APPLY TO YOU? And GO BUY SOME NEW SOCKS AND HAVE A SHOWER. Ugh, people.

So four weeks ago I got my third call for lungs. After two dry runs, I was at the point where I was no longer nervous, just eager to get things started and get it over with so that I could hopefully have all of this behind me by my 30th birthday (which is June 1st) - side note, I counted out my weeks yesterday and saw that June 1st lands within the 12th week of my stint here, which should be my LAST WEEK. I was told by one doctor that they have in the past allowed people to leave early if they are doing exceedingly well and I brought it up with another doctor and the nurse yesterday and they weren't keen on making promises THEN the nurse handed me a requisition form for an MRI on June 2nd. I may need to kung fu fight someone on this one. I would like to be PICC free and home for my birthday. I will have to work my magic on the other three doctors...

So I got the call at 4:26 on Friday. I was in the middle of talking to a friend when the other line clicked in and I assumed it was the transplant co-ordinator calling to schedule my three-month check-up. So I switched over and when she gave me the offer, I literally told her that I really had no other plans that night, so why not. I was so calm that mom was confused as to what the hell was going on. She said we had a bit of time and could drive if we wanted to or we could arrange to fly but after two flights, I was over the thrill so mom and I hopped in the car and had a nice, calm drive to Edmonton. Leaving the house in Airdrie was the last time I drew a breath of fresh air for three weeks.

I didn't call too many people of post the latest call on facebook. I told my brother not to play communications officer until we knew for sure that surgery was a go. It was hard enough getting people's hopes up the first two times. This time, things were calm. Lauren, Chris and dad arrived a couple of hours after mom and I, we were out of worries and tears after the first two attempts so Lauren and Chris just sat with me while I tried to nap and then around 3 o'clock, the time actually came. Up until that point, I was daring the universe to prove me wrong and show me that surgery was actually going to happen.

Also, oddly enough, that Friday, Ian was getting on a flight to come over for his spring break so I managed to reach him in time to tell him to switch his flight to Edmonton and he landed not long after I got out of surgery.

So my family got to walk along with the stretcher to the surgical waiting room. This dark room (it was 3 am) where I laid in this bed, gowned and gloved and capped while they hovered nervously around me. I wanted to save my family and myself from having to have forced, meaningful conversation so I demanded silence, which of course my dad couldn't abide and he mumbled awkwardly about how he likes to eat things in 4s and 6s because that's how many people are in our family (kids/people) and I was in bed 4 so it was some sign or something. THIS IS WHY I DEMAND SILENCE. Sigh. The surgeon came in and asked if I had any questions and after two dry runs all I had to ask was 'Are you going to do a good job?' He told me that one of my parents could come in to the OR while I was being put out so my poor mother came in for the HORROR.

 I am a pretty tough kid. I can deal with a lot with a brave face but I fear needles a little. But I can handle it. I fear them most in my wrist arteries and neck. Before they put me to sleep, they needed to start a central line. My legs started trembling uncontrollably and he put the freezing in to my strapped down wrist as I laid on the cold table, knowing what torture awaited my adorable little body. Even with the freezing, I could tell that the guy was missing the arterial line in my wrist REPEATEDLY. He was so frustrated that the anaesthesiologist told me to turn my head as he tried to start a neck line and he also missed repeatedly. So the wrist guy straps down the other wrist to give the other side a go. I was sobbing uncontrollably and my legs trembled so hard I'm pretty sure the nurse was rubbing them to calm me as much as to keep me still. Finally they gassed me and everything went black.

 They woke me up about 4 hours later. I remember not much of the ICU. I have been told many things, I was terrified at first, I was hilarious, I was stoned. I was told that my mind would gleefully block out most of the experience.

OOOOH, the flush has started.... My writing time is coming to an end so I'll cease my journey down memory lane. I'll pick that up later.

 It has been a good week. Ian took the week off to play a part in my entourage, dutifully carrying my mom's hot pink gym bag around the hospital and cleaning my gym equipment when I finished with it. I took him to the Red Lobster because it was his birthday a few weeks ago and I had far too many chest tubes to celebrate with him, plus he was in another country. So it was Lobster Fest and lobster is that sea-lover's favourite food and that was his birthday date (otherwise I wouldn't be caught dead in such a place with my refined pallette.) We ordered the same meal - two lobsters with a shrimp/lobster pasta plus a potato, buns and salad. Thanks to my, hopefully drug-enduced newfound appetite, I polished off my entire plate before my boyfriend - who is literally more than double my size. It was a sight to be seen. I was uncomfortable but I'm pretty sure I still managed to polish off my bag of Doritos before I went to sleep that night....

 I still have a few pounds to go before I can stop referring to myself as heroin-chic so I am not complaining, plus my prednisone dose should be dropping for the fourth time next week so all of this will slowly improve.

 IVS are over. I still have two more weeks of this so there will be more tales to follow...