No House Here

So I went back in for my second steroid treatment in the series this afternoon. I made sure I was hydrated, and I had eaten before I went in, so hopefully I wouldn't pull a 'turn white and drop' like I did yesterday. No worries. I was so hydrated I was begging for a bathroom on the way in to the exam room. The closest one, please. Like, now!
So I went to the bathroom and then to the exam room and had a seat in the big recliner with the butcher's paper on it. I love that butcher's paper. It's for catching germs and fluids. Like blood. Real confidence-builder when she's about to stick a little spike into my vein!
So the tall girl was going to stick me again. Yesterday she worked on my left hand, so today she wanted to give that hand a rest and work on the right. I had my little netbook with me, so I could read one of the books I have loaded into it. My friend JW wrote it, and it's good. It's called "Hotblood: A House of Slide Novel", and clicking on the title will get you to it's listing on Amazon, in case you're interested. I told Tall Girl I wanted to have my right hand free so I could type. What I didn't tell her was that, more than wanting to type, I wanted to localize the damage. Sheesh!
Well, she decided that the left hand had taken quite a beating yesterday, so she really wanted to work with the right today. I relented. Typing or not, spreading the damage out or not, the reason I was there was to get the dang treatment and start sweating again. I got the netbook (a 7" amazingly cheap netbook, a Sylvania purchased at CVS for $99. Barely lets me do anything but read and write on it, but that's good enough for me.) out and ready to read, with the book called up and already on the right page. Then Tall Girl went to work.

• 1st vein - straight through the whole vein and into the meat below. Bad stick. And a little painful! I recently read somewhere that when men are unwell they are worse than pre-pubescent teenage girls. I protest! I took this sticking like a man! A man who was not acting like a pre-pubescent teenage girl!
  I said "Ouch? Ouch?"
• 2nd vein - straight through the whole vein and into the meat below. Just re-read the 1st vein thing.

TG called it quits and called in JS, the experienced nurse she is training under. JS sets up, chooses a vein in the crook of my right arm, and before you can say "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", or if you can't say that then 'really fast', I had a hep-lock in my arm. 
Take that, Tall Girl!
So they had the hep-lock in my arm, and now all they had to do was attach the line from the IV bag. The bag was hanging on my left, but they were working on my right. JS was holding the hep-lock down with one hand, until someone got her some tape. She asked the other girl, who was tall but not as tall as Tall Girl, to hand her the line. Not So Tall Girl took the line and handed it over, but the end was still capped. JS had one hand busy holding that hep-lock down, so she held it back out to Not So Tall, holding it right over me, and asked her to pull the cap off. Not So Tall did just that, and to all of our surprise a jet of Prednisone Solumedrol solution shot out of the uncapped tube. 
Directly onto the keyboard of my open netbook.
Huzzah.
JS pinched off the tube, stopping the jet, and told Not So Tall "You didn't clamp it."
Not a year, a semester, a single class of medical training, and I already knew that.
They clamped it, and attached the tube to the hep-lock, and paper-toweled off my keyboard. I still read "Hotblood", and the 'scroll-down' key seemed to be working fine. That's all I did. I didn't bother to try typing since all I had was my off-hand, and if I started to freak out that they had destroyed my netbook right there in the chair, I may have pulled out that hard won IV line. 
Flying jets of medication or not, fried netbook or not, the reason I was there was to get the dang treatment and start sweating again.
Grrrrr...
So I got the treatment, and I didn't feel ill or anything. Everything was fine. Until I got the netbook home and actually tried it out.
It was impossible to use just one key. Hit the 'T' and the machine typed 'TG'. 'D' was 'DC' '4' was '4R'... you get the point. I had a very hard time not losing my temper at that moment. I had gotten the dang treatment, and I wasn't sweating. There had been flying jets of medication, and it seemed that I had wound up with a fried netbook, so why the hell wasn't I drenched in perspiration? My son watched me warily for a few minutes as I stared off into space and focused on breathing deeply. I didn't count to ten, or anything. It would just remind me that the '8' on my netbook was the one key that didn't work at all now.


At one point yesterday I compared my visit to the doc to the TV show "House". Today I realized that there is no House where I go.

It's a little more "Keystone Cops".


Talk to you later!


P.S. - FYI, the netbook came back once it dried out. Mostly. If any of you see me putting down my area code as "97(4+4)", it's because the freakin' '8' still doesn't work!


TTYL!