My first
day home.
Friday,
February 18th, 2005
For the drive home, Bob installed a foam pad in the back of his minivan in case I got tired on the two-hour journey back to Connecticut . I began by sitting in the back seat. (For eight weeks, open heart surgery patients have to sit in the back seat of cars that have airbags) After half an hour, I got tired and lay down on the foam pad. It was a very comfortable ride home. I felt good. I had energy.
Bob showed me around the house and the changes he had made in the nearly three months I’d been away. I loved what he had done. Bob has a special way of making a house feel comfortable and homey and he had done a wonderful job. He traded in our old king size bed for a high quality double bed, which we both needed to support our backs. And he put the mattress on some antique furniture we sort of inherited. A four poster bed. Something I’d always wanted. And plants filled the office.
Later, Bob had some errands to do and I didn’t feel ready to be alone, so I went with him, lying on the foam pad. It felt so good to be moving around outside the hospital room. I had a lot more energy than I expected. The nurses said this was due to one of the medicines I was taking.
Back home for the night I felt disoriented. Torn from routines, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wasn’t in pain, but very stiff. The arm exercises the physical therapists gave me were very helpful in keeping my chest loose.
I worked at my desk a little, got through one of the many piles of papers Bob had so neatly arranged and organized for me. That felt good as a lot of piles had accumulated in the past three months.
My biggest task was organizing the grocery-bag full of medicines we had picked up at the pharmacy. Somehow I had to make some order out of them. The transplant nurses had given me preprinted sheets to fill out, but they required filling in every day the specific meds I was taking. I came up with another idea, and typed up a list of my own. Then I could easily check off each medicine after I’d taken each day. (Thankfully, my fingers could work a keyboard, though I made a lot of spelling errors.)
I also had to record my blood pressure, pulse, temperature, and weight every morning and evening, and check my blood glucose level before and after breakfast. They gave me the “One Touch” blood removal apparatus, which made it as easy as possible. Still it’s a self-inflicted prick in the finger. I felt great compassion for diabetics who have to do this far more often than the two times a day I was subjected to.
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