Installing the Wound Vac
I never did have to stick my finger into Don’s belly wound (see previous entry). The home health nurse showed up early Tuesday morning and installed the wound vacuum before I had to do any cleaning and repacking myself. Thank goodness! So now he has a new ileostomy and suction tubes in his belly leading to a little vacuum box he has to carry around slung over his shoulder like an Italian man-purse. He has so many tubes and bags and wires and devices sticking out of him that he looks like an artificial life form.
A friend of mine said we had better be on the lookout for an alien popping out of his belly. If it weren’t so horrifying, it would be funny, like Charlie Brown tangled in his kite string, hanging upside down in a tree, comforting himself that it couldn’t be worse just before it starts to rain.
So much is going on with the health and the nursing, etc. (besides the fact that I’m supposed to be finishing the new book!), that I have decided to retire from my two multi-author blogs, Type M 4 Murder and Fatal Foodies, at least for the interim. I’m sad to do it. I managed to maintain my post all through the spouse’s earlier health crisis in 2009, but this situation has gotten the better of me. Type M and FF have been a wonderful experience for me, and I have made many good friends because of them.
I posted my farewell entries yesterday, if you want to take a look. Just click on the green titles above.
Don keeps coming up with complications upon complications, but In many ways I feel very lucky. So many friends and relations are undergoing troubles right now, or have borne the unbearable, that I cannot by any stretch of the imagination feel that God is picking on us. John Donne knew whereof he spoke when he told us for whom the bell tolls. Don and I have been married 37 years and gone through a lot together. When you’re young and first marry, I think you don’t fully grasp the import of the words “in sickness and health”. It’s quite an education when you first begin to realize what you actually signed up for. My biggest surprise is that in a lot of ways, taking care of him feels something like a privilege.
I’m also amazed and gratified to realize how kind and wonderful most people are.
More Places to Go
Donis on Facebook
Type M for Murder