Port side is on the left (LCW - Left Chest Wall)

Here it is, the 9th of February, and I see that I missed yesterday's entry. The meaningless title of this entry should bear some witness to my mental condition brought on by two days' worth of physical anguish so bad it would take an effort by Dante to describe it.

Well, yesterday was sort of a blur of the various side-effects one so often associates with chemotherapy. Nausea, described by someone other than myself as, "the technicolor yawn," was not in short supply. This is interesting in that there had been no real food ingested for at least 24 hours prior to the first performance (followed by many an encore). Medication in pill form is just about useless since there is no selectivity in the mechanism that wants to get rid of anything. Thus, we are left to medicine that can be entered through the port or, in the more interesting of cases, through a large muscle. I leave it to imaginations better than mine to further describe the muscle in question.

It has been some time since I wrote that last paragraph and the nausea situation improved after a shot of anti-nausea stuff through the port. I have had since then two pieces of toast with the daring addition of what passes for butter in a health care institution.

The man who caused my sudden removal from my private room died yesterday and his daughter came to tell me and to thank me for giving my bed to her father. What else was I supposed to do? Here is what happened.

At about 3:00 a.m., one of the nurses came to my room and told me a patient had an aneurysm that had popped and that he could last for hours or he could last for days. The problem lay in the size of his family who turned out to be numerous. The question was whether I would give up my room for the convenience of this family who were about the lose one of its members. At that point, how do you negotiate? You simply do what needs to be done. It took about an hour for the move to be finalized, during which time I sat in the visitors' lounge where I met this man's daughter. Naturally uspset, she managed to attempt some conversation and began thanking me. I told her not to think of it but to think of her father and her family. I would have talked to her the rest of the night but it simply seemed to me she needed some time either alone or with her family members. She did mention that her father seemed to respond with hand squeezes to familiar voices. That is when I told her about my idea that hearing is the last of the functions to go and that talking was one of the best things to do in a case such as hers. She appreciated what I had to say and listened with some interest to my experience with Mary in her last hours.

It was good to do something for someone, especially when I was in no position to look out for myself.