Jon Is Getting "Collected"

He is in a bed for the next five hours, getting his stem cells collected. My notes from last time (Sept 28, 2010) say that he was chilly, he did the NYT crossword puzzles, he napped, and he read. I bet this time will be similar but I can't report on that first hand because there is no room for a chair in his room. He is alone with his nurse.  After that he will go back to the hospital because they still haven't finished getting the vancomycin delivered from the Kaiser pharmacy and this is the way they will keep him on those antibiotics until then. 

*****
I don't really have much of a job here. This has been such a slow process that it is easy to forget where we are headed. We still don't know what the schedule will be (no one has said a word) so we don't know what happens tomorrow. But eventually we will get to the part where he feels pretty terrible and then my job will become more clear. Pretty sure he won't eat anything for a long time to come. They just replace his missing electrolytes whenever they get another report, which is every single day. 

Yesterday while we were in the hospital room (Jon was there all day, I was there hanging out with him and knitting from 10 - 8), there were plenty of distractions. Jon needed to know what the gallons/minute flow is in the greenhouse so he could order a new Dosatron -- Julia filled a five gallon bucket and reported back. Benjamin is still trying to get the water heater in the Horse Barn to work, so they were troubleshooting that over the phone. Jon is kicking himself for not finishing that task before we left. He did a lot of other things, just didn't quite finish that. Carrie planted seeds in the ground that I had prepared (so nicely) on Sunday. Those were the first seeds of the season in Vienna. So far we are right on schedule with everything at the farm.  Today is the first day there will be a small crew working.

As always, the nurses are very nice. The day nurse yesterday (the one with 28 years of experience in this realm) has four children, the youngest is 20.  The night nurse also has four children and wishes so much that she had grandchildren, but she told them not to rush into marriage and now she just has to be patient. Jon says she just about melted onto the floor when he showed her a picture of Mika.  I am so impressed with these women who have so many kids plus a full time job with 12 hour shifts. Always impressed by nurses, especially the seasoned ones. And I love having the perspective that we get from Alissa on the workings of a hospital. It helps me to be more patient. Jon is a little bit less patient but so far he hasn't yelled at anyone...

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