Home sweet home...

Tuesday night I was released from the hospital. I was away from home for a total of ten days and I was horribly home-sick. My mother-in-law was so wonderful, staying several nights camped out in the smallest of chairs and eating the leftover food from my meal trays. My husband was there for a couple nights and was there for the Hickman placement. His voice was one of the first voices I heard when I was coming out of surgery. When I was at the step down floor he made several origami cranes for me and placed them along the windowsill. On the day I was planning to leave, the Accredo nurse, who was training me on the IV pump, turned all the cranes to face home. Through the rest of the day, all the cranes and I looked towards home, anxiously waiting.

Since arriving home I've had daily visits from an Accredo nurse. Each day she has helped us go through the steps of mixing the medication, changing the cartridge on the pump, and starting the meter on the pump. She demonstrated changing the dressing on the Hickman yesterday. I thought it was disgusting seeing the hole in my chest with the tube sewn in. I suppose I will get used to it, but it is so weird. The nurse is extremely sweet and I like her a lot, so when she starts leaving us on our own, like tomorrow, I will miss her visits.

Every day I've been home I've had a gigantic appetite and keep eating. In the hospital I got very little protein. The majority of the food they offered was starches and sugars. What little hunk of meat showed up on my plate, I devoured. The vegetables were canned variety and much of the fruit offered was swimming in artificially flavored syrup. Dessert options included packaged cups of stuff--sherbet, pudding, frozen yogurt--all with artificial or substitute sweeteners, artificial flavors and artificial colors, emulsifiers like headache-causing carrageenan, and other stuff people should never be eating anyway.

Today I started getting my INR monitored, so that I don't take too little or too much blood thinning medication. Being on a thinner means being more careful as the blood will not clot as quickly as normal. I also have to watch certain foods that can alter the function of the medicine or else my INR reading could be thrown off.

I go to the Cleveland Clinic next week for a follow up and more blood-work. I am pretty sure they replaced all of my blood with saline while I was there. So, I assume they want to make sure they drain me again before my body has time to recover.