Tuesday, July 28

So far today, I spent most of the AM being lazy in my hospital bed. I went to the bathroom twice - required quite a bit of wire & tube juggling. To be exact, 8 tubes & wires had to be unhooked and kept untangled. Then, I had to keep the chest tubes from tangling as I hauled the chest tube drainage tubs with me since I couldn't unhook from them.

After situating in the bathroom and doing my business, I had to repeat everything backward to rehook everything without things getting tangled. Basically, just going to the bathroom is quite a chore. Not painful - just a chore to keep things from becoming a tangled mess. Now, with one chest tube removed, I'll have one less thing to deal with.

I had my first real breakfast of something more than Cheerios today. I had a two-egg omelet with potatoes, peppers and mushrooms. Also, had hash browns and a blueberry muffin. I ate all but about half of the hash brown potatoes. Had two cartons of whole milk.

About 10:30am, a person came in to remove one of my chest tubes. Kinda like the catheter, removal wasn't painful. But is was a little bizarre feeling. "Hold your breath, breathe out, hold your breath again, breath out, take a deep breath and hold it" and let out let out a loud noise like a karate yell (OK, so I added that last one myself both times!!). Adding the final karate yell seemed to help me feel better about it.

He cleaned me up and re-bandaged the incision and remaining chest tube. He had me take a few test breaths and left. So much a procedure that I had fretted about.

So...now I'm sitting hear watching TV. Watched the last portion of Witness. Now watching something on the Travel Channel. It will have to go once I'm done writing. Some dude is in a jungle letting insects, slugs and slimy critters latch onto his skin. Apparently, the idea of the show is to show these little critters and how to get rid of them. Boom - I'll change the channel and they'll be gone.

More later since it is only 11:23am.