little pinch

that's what they tell you when they go to put a needle in you: little pinch.

this morning when i was down in procedure room #4 (which is where they do the ECT, but you probably have some reasoning skills and know that already)

anyway, i was in there and someone asked me how i got all the bruises up and down my arms.

"they're from the IV's" i told them.

it's the kind of moment when you can hear eyebrows go flying up into hairlines.

so this is how my morning goes, three days a week:

i wake up and put on something with short sleeves and usually a minute or two after that the IV nurse comes in to start the IV and often as not puts it somewhere i'd rather not have it go. it hurts more when it passes over a joint, and the smaller the vein they use, the more painful the medication is when it goes in.

lately she puts it in the back of one of my hands, no matter what i have to say about it. i have heard the explanation about why it needs to be placed so far out. i understand that when it goes higher up my arm, there is increased risk of blowing a vein.

apparently when you nick it, it can't be used again for a while.

so. after the IV gets started, the guy from transport shows up with a wheelchair to take me down. i always decline the chair; i prefer to walk.

when we get down to the pre-op/PACU units (which are separate but yet connected) i climb up onto a stretcher and wait. i listen to my ipod (only the most brilliant invention of the century)and usually a nurse comes and covers me with a warm blanket. often i fall asleep.

when it's my turn they wheel me into procedure room #4 and everybody gets to their jobs. there are a lot of things that have to be done: i have to be hooked up for EKG and some other things and the folks from anesthesia have to go to work.

the med lock has lots of tubes; four or five and they pump in lidocaine first which is good, because i can only guess how insanely painful the next meds would be without it.

i'm trying to learn to identify the different meds by taste. i'm not having much luck because the whole experience tends to wipe out your memory.

when they put in the muscle relaxant your eyes relax and go all funny and you have to close them. and the sedative goes in so painfully that i am usually screaming or crying when i pass out.

i wake up on the stretcher in PACU and they roll me back upstairs where i choke down some breakfast and fall asleep. "choke" is really the operative term, because after the anesthesia i have trouble swallowing.

then i sleep for a while. today i slept until three in the afternoon, which means i missed almost an entire nursing shift.

there are a lot of new people up here, so the place has a whole different feeling to it. they've moved my room to the east side of shep 6, to a single.

and i have to make a correction: my old room isn't the only double up here.

i have a nicer view, though. i can see my mountains from the window: mt. mansfield right in the center. ricker mountain is easy to pick out since there's still snow on the trails, and bolton mountain is farther front and a little to the left.

the weather has been nice, so the views have been pretty.

the stuff they put in my hair to help the electrodes conduct dries crunchy like papier-mache.

there are two TVs playing too loudly at the moment, and someone is playing with the keyboard. the worst of it is that two of the patients are screaming. it is the rhythmic shouting of someone in advanced stages of dementia, and it set off a very psychotic young woman, with her own very rapid and repetitive garbled speech.

i wonder if they're going to end up putting her into seclusion.

at any rate, it's goign to be a bumpy night; the kind of night where you are painfully aware that you are on shep 6 as opposed to shep 3.

i've got to go. i think the trays have come up and dinner is here.