Blood

I'm sitting in the chair waiting to get my blood drawn. It's routine blood work that my doctor ordered after my last appointment. It's also the fourth set of blood work in about a month. Perhaps because of that the veins in my left arm decided to hide and she decided to switch to the right arm instead. I don't think anyone really likes blood work, but when she tells me to take a deep breath, I ignore her and instead watch while she jabs the needle in my arm. Maybe that's odd, but that's just what I do. She found a vein on her first try which is a relief. Two vials of blood later, she taped a piece of cotton to my arm and I was on my way home.

About a month before this appointment, when they were inserting the IV in emergency, they tried the back of my left hand, then the back of my right hand, before finally succeeding on the inside of my lower right arm. Since they also drew blood from my left arm, I ended up with three pieces of cotton taped to my arm plus the IV. The blood tests in the ER were also very extensive. I'm not sure exactly how many vials they drew, but there were a lot and some of them were substantially larger than normal. One of the extra tests, triacylglycerol lipase, was directly related to their eventual diagnosis while others were, I suspect, related to the possibility that I might need urgent surgery.

After getting poked and prodded, having a chest and abdominal x-ray, an ECG, an ultrasound, and a CT scan, the result was that I had acute pancreatitis. The treatment for that is bowel rest and pain management. So, IV fluids to help with dehydration, dilaudid and Tylenol for pain management, and a full fluid diet. That meant that I didn't really have to eat hospital food. They really only gave me oatmeal, cream of something soup, pudding, and ice cream along with tea or coffee. Because I came in late on Friday, I also didn't even get information about choosing menu options until Monday morning by which point I was so close to leaving that I didn't bother. I guess I did have one actual meal. My last meal there included green beans, cabbage rolls, perogies, and soup. It lived up to the hospital food expectations, but caused no distress, so I got to go home afterwards.

Most of my stay at the General was pretty uneventful. When I was there at the end of June, visitors weren't allowed on the ward, so I mostly only ever talked to the doctors, nurses, and staff. My room mate, was given special permission to have his mother visit so I chatted with her as well, but mostly I wasn't really in a talking mood, so I didn't really mind not having visitors. (At least until Monday when I was feeling better and was also feeling bored.) The no visitor rule was one of a few COVID changes. Staff were all wearing masks, there were screening questions when arriving at the ER, and, apparently, everyone who got admitted was allowed to get a COVID test. (At the time, there were no cases in Regina and neither I nor anyone I knew had travelled recently, so I declined.) Also, possibly related, was the lack of wait when I went to the ER. Maybe Friday at about 1 pm is normally quiet, but I had barely sat down in the waiting room before they had called me into the exam area and there really wasn't anyone else sitting in the waiting room.

Not that I'm entirely sure what has changed. While I've visited people when they were in hospital, this is the first time since I was born that I've stayed overnight in a hospital, so I definitely learned some things:

• IVs are annoying. The tubing gets caught on things, the pump is noisy, and you have to drag it around everywhere you go. I also learned how to restart the pump after kinking the line so the nurse didn't have to come in whenever I did that which seemed to be an hourly occurence.
• Hospital food is truly terrible. I don't know what they did to the green beans, but they were almost inedible.
• Hospital bedding isn't much better. The adjustable bed is kind of nice, but the plastic covered pillows and mattress aren't very comfortable and the sheets were always getting tangled. I was also too hot most of the time, but I had a fever, so that's not really the fault of the bedding.
• Dilaudid is very good at killing pain. I don't remember getting any sort of rush out of it. The first dose made me dizzy and it seemed like the room was spinning up and down. The second dose made me nauseous for a couple of minutes. Both of those were in the ER though and were injected. Once I was up on the ward they gave it to me in pill form and there were no further side effects. (At least not that I noticed.)
• Don't ask me to remember your name when I'm extremely tired and taking pain killers. I'm certain that the nurses introduced themselves to me on Friday night and Saturday morning, but I can't say I remember any of their names or really much of anything from Saturday.
• That slightly surly but more experienced nurse knows what's going on. Listen to her when she tells you that it's okay to press the call button.
• Avoid taking all the laxatives. I guess I needed them, but that was a lot of cramps for a long time afterwards.

Overall, I'm pretty lucky - no surgery, no scars, no real long term implications. I had poor appetite and low energy afterwards and some pain and bruising where the IV was, but that passed pretty quickly. My regular doctor recommended staying away from fatty foods which I was doing instinctively anyway and also suggested that I should avoid anything too spicy. I miss french fries, but otherwise, it hasn't been too bad. And that most recent blood draw, my doctor didn't call me in for a follow up appointment, so there's nothing he's too concerned about and from what I saw on eHealth, it's possibly the most normal my levels have been. Staying health, I guess.