Battle Hymns of a Hot Mess Mom

Since Wednesday I have been hacking up a lung and coughing up mucus into tissues then today I ran out of tissues and the Respiratory Tech says why don’t you use the suction stick instead of tissues. I swear my face…I couldn’t control it. Seriously, none of you people could a told me?

No one damn person. They just watch me grab a tissue and spit into it. Like damn… my self advocation has been to ask for experienced nurses. I’m on a respiratory floor, and while they get overflow…typically they don’t see a ton of oncology patients. They may not know the proper protocols on cleaning a picc, drawing from a picc that could really effect me having very little immune system. So before shift change I ask my current nurse of the shift if they would please ask the charge nurse to assign me a more experienced nurse. It makes a world of difference.

Nurse J knew instantly that because my platelets were too low for that. That’s what I need. I need an experienced nurse. Nurse E drew blood from my picc like with 4 syringes. One to flush, one to draw the discard blood, one to draw the blood and one last one to flush. Nurse E would then fill each individual test tube bottles with the blood she drew. I know I said before 7 minutes vs 3 minutes. But what I didn’t account for was the potential for contamination which is what happened. In the process of Nurse E filling the blood in the test tubes something got into the tubes and resulted in the ordering of an emergency CT. Thankfully Nurse T stepped in and said, let’s retest the blood and see if the results are the same.

I certainly didn’t mean to make a face. But when she said she can’t do that and that it doesn’t work that way…I made “THE” curled lip stanky face. Nurse T’s sample came back clean. To amend my previous comment about “eh it’s only another extra 7 minutes” I was wrong.

Nurse J asked me what I did for a living. I responded, “All the wrong things.” He nodded and responded “Workaholic” in which I just nodded. He asked me if I was in the medical field and I laughed and said “Nope, never had a stomach for blood. But you know leukemia.” He surprising said that a lot of cancer patients know QUITE a lot about their care. They are heavily invested in knowing what they are supposed to take and not take. He said cancer patients pick up the lingo.