August 24, 2009

2am...can't sleep...wonder why...about a gabillion reasons. Update since we've been home, Scott woke up at 5am Saturday morning with the machine they sent him home with the assist in a speedy recovery from his infection alarming. Here's the deal, no one at the hospital explained to us how to use the machine. The discharge burse had no idea but explained that someone from the company that manufactures the machine would be calling on Saturday. We're thinking "okay, what could go wrong between now and then." At 5am with the alarm going off we realized that, yes in fact things can go wrong! After a good 15 minutes we determined how to turn the alarm off - but couldn't figure out how to determine why it was alarming in the first place. Had to call the manufacturer. The person walked us through some basic steps and apparently there was a leak. Well I would say so, because we soon discovered the reason (I'm pretty sure on this, but it was very early after a very long week) that the machine was never turned on by the nurse, which is not a good thing. So the tech tells us to tape the leak - thinking it's the machine leaking. Problem solved until the next alarm at 8:30am. Had to call again for help. Called again and started a series of calls that took up most of the morning around Scott and I trying to get just a bit more sleep. The conclusion of the calls resulted in them telling us they would send someone out Sunday to review everything. Well how in the heck is that going to help things if it wasn't turned on for 9 hours when we left the hospital...the damage is probably done at this point! Okay, whatever, they'renot going to be here so fine, we'll just do until they get here...in 24 hours. So the nurse calledabout 11am Sunday to find out when to come by. I asked if she knew about the issues we had with the machine and she says that yes the information was passed onto her.She showed up around 5pm goes through all the presentation stuff...clearly covering the do's and don'ts of the whole process with the nurses and them about 7pm she finally gets to removing the machine to swap everything out with "fresh" items (Note - I don't want to gross anyone out so I trying to stick with safer descriptives). She mentioned several times that the area the machine is treating should look a certain way and that if it did not then they would have to have their head nurse come to the house to determine if the machine could coninue to be used. Sure enough that's is exactly, exactly what happened. I swear I couldn't make this up if I were trying any harder. The reason this is such a big deal is Scott is going to have to wait for this to heal before he get's back to transplant surgery. She explained that with the machine it's a minimum of 4 weeks. So, another setback, because without the machine my best guess is add two more weeks or even four more weeks...that's 2 months. Scott and I were just pretty much numb when she left. He's back to dialysis tonigh and I'm here...not able to turn my head off. ARGH!!!!!