I went in for a dental cleaning and checkup the day before I got launched into hospital and at the time the hygienist noted that my gums looked great. She didn’t really have to do anything at all.
At that point I’d been taking oral antibiotics for almost six weeks.
I’d thought about this over the last couple of days and noticed that my teeth and gums are almost pristine.
Hope I don’t start running into the downsides of long-term antibiotics soon cause this part’s really nice.
Technically I’ve been ‘home’ since Wednesday but since I didn’t leave the hospital until almost noon and didn’t get home late in the afternoon, my first full day home was Thursday.
I spent a fair amount of it sleeping but not as much as I’d hoped to do.
For the remaining two weeks I’ve got to give myself IV antibiotics every 8 hours. This means getting the hand-grenade(s) out of the refrigerator an hour ahead of time and letting them warm up.
Then I go through a routine of opening various syringes (no needles, yay) and pushing liquids into my arm before finally hooking up the anti-b. It takes about 30 minutes to empty into my arm and during this time I can do pretty much anything I want. No marathon running, but since that’s not generally on the menu of things to do during my day, I’m not missing that.
Once a day I have a second grenade to drink in and while I’ve been doing that in the middle of the day, I’m moving that so I can do my hour in the evening.
The ear seems to be healing properly (at least the doc thought so yesterday) and I’m due to go back to work on Wed. I’ve still got a little bit of dizziness but I have some exercises to do and I’m going to take the Susan driving test before the weekend is out to see if I will be able to drive myself to work in the near-term.
If anyone needs some empty syringes (great for measuring liquids out precisely) or tubing with external clamps, let me know. I really hate throwing all this stuff away and as long as it’s not used for food should be useful for *something*. The Maker in me keeps wanting to do something with it.
I was just thinking that I hope that waking up at 4am (or earlier) doesn’t become a normal thing post-hospital but then another part of my mind reminded the first part that I used to get up that early all the time and work on various projects in my mad-scientist laboratory. I haven’t been able to do that for quite some time.
It’s probably too much to hope that fixing the problems associated with the cholesteatoma will result in better sleep and a renewed ability to get up early again for ‘workshop time.’ I’ll hold out a little though.
First the ubiquitous picture of a handsome dog to save the squeamish among you, though there really isn’t anything squeamishing in this post unless you count the picture of me later on down. I just needed an excuse to include a picture of my running buddy.
I’ve been in places where we (I am two people, Myself and Susan. Just so you know) have had no internet connection while away from home and been in places where we have full internet connection (at times, anyway) while away from home.
You’re in the hospital and your first choice of movie of the day is Lord of the Rings.
Playing on the flat screen in the room connected to your laptop.
And you’re blogging about it.
Of course, it helps that I have a geek wife who thought to bring the movie and cable out.