Apheresis Day

I still go fortnightly for apheresis therapy. The therapy is still administered by a beautiful nurse with excellent bedside manner. It's still not the highlight of my week.

The upside, aside from being my best shot at being a senior citizen someday, is I get a block of Netflix time. I sometimes stream while I'm falling asleep at night, or when I'm sick (last weekend I made it through all of the first season of Better Call Saul just because I felt too lousy to do anything but screen time). And while TV isn't something I want being the center of every day life, when I can find good shows it makes the time pass quickly. While I sit with 17 gauge needles in both elbows, forbidden from moving even a little bit, that's when I binge on The Office.

I'm a bit concerned now that I'm into season nine of The Office. It's a great show, but I'm about out of it. An apheresis session lasts longer than most movies, and the remote I bought from Apple as so far eluded pairing with my MacBook Pro. I hate having to ask the lovely nurse to navigate for me, though she's a good sport about it, so I like when I can lock in a program and just let it ride for the several hours my blood gets filtered. I guess I better get by the Apple Store soon and find out why my Apple remote is not talking to my Apple computer.

They've been filtering me with a Braun device for the past year and a half. But apparently there are availability issues with the supplies for it, so they told me they'd put me on the Kaneka this time. Except I heard 'Konica' because I figured it was Konica-Minolta who made it, a manufacturer I've heard of like Braun. Kaneka is Japanese, but it's a different company. Anyway, this machine apparently takes a little longer to do the job (and apparently there are several variables involved so they took pre and post labs to see how the treatment did compared to what they've been doing). I talked my way into a slightly earlier start and warned my boss I'd be later than usual for work. And things went well as far as I can tell, and on my way out of KU Med I picked up my Crestor prescription at the pharmacy and went on to work.

And got there and reached for my laptop, not so much that I need it at work but I tend not to leave it in the car. And it wasn't there. I realized I must have left it in the lobby of the pharmacy, and as I drove frantically back there I dialed them. And spent almost the whole way there on hold, they're big on having the robot take the phone calls, which is fine when you're calling in a refill and not so hot when you're shitting your pants that you might have donated your $2700 computer and sweet noise-canceling headphones to a wino. Well, they don't really let winos run the halls at KU, but it is an urban hospital campus, and if someone just walked off with the bag like they owned it, I'd be stuck finding out how good LoJack really is.

When I did finally get a pharmacy tech on the phone she was like, 'Yeah, it's still on the chair, I'll move it behind the counter.' Such a relief.

Oh, and anyway, progress report: they wrap my arms in colorful Coban after my therapy to hold things together since they've run the equivalent of electrical conduit into my veins. When I started the therapy I started a Coban ball. It's growth has really slowed as the diameter has grown because Coban isn't very thick. It weighs one pound eleven ounces. Not quite as big as a volleyball at this point, but significantly past grapefruit size.