Infusion
Elizabeth, one of the super nurses at the Infusion Unit of the Hospital for Special Surgery, was kind enough to take this photograph for me. Believe me, the IV is not painful in the least. The Remicade solution, which is made to order when I arrive, is fed through a sort of pump into the vein; if tilting the hand causes a delivery slowdown, a rather pesky alarm goes off. Whether or not this happens seems to be a matter of luck, of just how squarely the needle fits (so to speak) into the tiny vein. No alarms went off today, not for me, but a lady in the next chair had occasion to roll her eyes several times after inadvertently setting off the racket. I've spent enough time in the Infusion Unit to know that an alarm-triggering IV is not anybody's fault.
What's painful - well, it's not painful, exactly, but it is a big drag - is the blood-pressure cuff. Two hours in its embrace, and my arm begins to feel sore. The monitor is automatic, and takes my blood pressure every half hour. This is not pleasant, because my blood pressure has been running high, ever since I stopped taking a hypertension medicine last week because it was implicated in the ghastly rash that exploded while I was in Istanbul. Toprol was the the third medication to cause some sort of allergic reaction in six months. Tomorrow, I will ask my internist to let me try a fourth. Meanwhile, I am beginning to take seriously the idea of lowering my blood-pressure naturally. Because the only foods that interest me are salty and greasy, or alcoholic, I will probably not live long enough to bring the problem under control - naturally. But I'm trying. My teatime snack this evening - remember, we don't eat until ten or eleven at night - was Alpine Lace Swiss cheese and Melba toast. A far cry from yesterday's Triscuits with bleu d'Auvergne. I hope.
Looking at my calendar, I see that not once in the past five months have three weeks gone by without at least one doctor's visit. I've gotten so tired of going to doctors (though the doctors themselves are all wonderful) that I've put off my physical exam. No longer; I'll schedule it tomorrow. If &c.
For those who just tuned in, bimonthly Remicade infusions have proven an effective deterrent of my two immune diseases, inflammatory bowel and ankylosing spondylitis. If Remicade had been around twenty years ago, I'd probably be able to nod my head, but now there's no way to turn bone back into disk.
Comments
Consarned autoimmune diseases! What is the damn point of such misbehavior? Dumb human bodies.
Posted by: Max | February 2, 2005 11:07 PM
An all too familiar sight - my Rituxan infusion coming up Monday will yield the same image, more or less (I start with the left hand), though I don't get the blood-pressure cuff. So far, no rash - and far fewer symptoms of NHL, thank you very much. All hail Remicade!
Posted by: Mark | February 3, 2005 12:10 AM
It was shortly after our first friendly loss to AIDS that I began to have "stiff neck" problems. Proper diagnosis wasn't made until ten years later, by which time most of the disks in my spine had ossified. No pain, once the process was over, but no moving parts, either.
It took me a while to figure out that, while I had an auto-immune disease, it wasn't that one. What I've got could be called, if even such a minimal degree of levity were permissible, AIRS: Auto-immune resurgency syndrome. There's a motif in my life that becomes more sardonic every year: too much of a good thing. Is. Not. Good.
Posted by: R J Keefe | February 3, 2005 12:16 AM
D'you know, that isn't a staple keeping the tube in place. It is the reflection of a ceiling fixture, caught in the transparent bandage tape. I didn't notice it at first; now it's all I can see.
Posted by: R J Keefe | February 3, 2005 09:07 PM