Jasmine has been vomiting more than usual since the dietician changed her feed. She was fine with one extra tablespoon of maxijul, but two spoonfuls have pushed her over the edge. She was vomiting through the night, last night and the night before, so we haven’t slept properly for two nights. And then tonight just before I sat down to write this I checked in on her and she was lying in a pool of vomit. It was all in her hair and round her neck. Poor thing. We have changed her feed back to what it was and just increased the volume and hopefully that will do the trick and we can all get a good night’s sleep.
We had our dialysis deliveries today and the guy turned up an hour after the slot we were allocated: 9am-12.45pm. This was rubbish, which is a shame as normally they are fantastic. This man had no end of trouble getting into the building (his small van was far too big to into the car park so he had to park outside) and getting lost (and was driving about our street asking people for directions!?!) and getting stuck with his trolley in the lift and making the lift jam until it made lots of alarming noise. He was just not having a good day. I was so tired at that point I thought it was funny, which probably didn’t help matters, and he nearly had a fit when I said that I hoped we didn’t get stuck in the lift after what he had done to it.
Lucky for us, we didn’t wait in *just* for him all morning. Oh no! We had other things to look forward to. We had our Fresenius deliveries which turned up on time this time and altogether. Last month they were dreadful, especially when I rang up to ask where my deliveries were before 9am (as their driver had mistakenly rung me up at 7am to collect supplies and not deliver anything) and the woman who answered said that she was a nurse and asked me to get off the line as she was waiting for dying people to ring her up and wasn’t interested in my problems.
We also had the community nurse come round this morning. We practised our subcutaneous injection techniques again by injecting a rubber ball with saline solution. It was good, except I had to wear very small latex gloves which cut off my circulation. She has left us a DVD to watch so that we know what to do in case Jasmine ever goes into anaphylatic shock after an injection. We will be getting out the popcorn to watch that one.
This evening I was so tired after the day’s excitement that it took me ages to set up the machine. I went into a trance during one of the three minute hand washes as I was so tired and washed my hands for about five minutes which would have been fine had I not touched the wall when I was drying my hands and had to wash them all over again. Once I had done another long handwash and got to the machine I realised that I hadn’t set the machine to self-test after I had connected one of the bags. I am not sure if this would have caused any problems from a sterile/safety point of view, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. I scrapped what was on the machine and started all over again. To do this I went off to wash my already clean hands and then realised I hadn’t got my equipment out and had to rewash my hands all over again once I had gotten my equipment ready, before I got the machine self-testing for yet another three minute handwash. My hands were very clean.
Tonight, after Jasmine vomited everywhere, she was beeping away as she wasn’t draining well, so I tipped her this way and that to get her to drain properly until she started to cry and the beeping stopped. Then just after she got back to sleep, Neil couldn’t get anything out of her stomach when he aspirated her tube (after all that vomiting) so he had to wake her up again to feed her some milk so that he could test the tube and get some milk back, before setting up the overnight feed. She was understandably upset about that too. Imagine spending the best part of the day vomiting because someone has fiddled with your feed and getting into bed for some shut-eye and then people come in fiddling with you and tipping you up and down and pulling the contents out of your stomach and waking you up to force feed you. Not happy!
Most of the time I try not to think too much about it all (especially when I am torturing Jasmine) and just get on with the task in hand, and luckily there are lots of tasks to get through so I don’t have to think at all. But on days like today when things don’t work properly and I haven’t slept properly, I get a bit teary and a bit frightened and a bit fed up. At times like these, I phone my dad who says: ‘Never mind, eh.’ He says this because he is a very wise man and knows that there is nothing in the world that anyone can say to me that will make it better. ‘Never mind, eh’ is the only thing to say. It gives me the strength to keep going, to go to bed, to get some sleep, and get up tomorrow and start all over again.