as small as a world and as large as alone

5:25am May 8, 2014

Up way too early in the morning, because this is when they scheduled my feeding tube change.  Hopefully everything should be routine, although the fact that I aspirated last night makes me nervous for my time under anesthesia.  I will have to warn the anesthesia team, yet again, to suction my g-tube before putting me under.  (They use propofol, which seems to work perfectly for me.  Versed and Fentanyl alone don’t do crap.)

I’m also stress-dosing the dexamethasone, because I can’t imagine a procedure like this isn’t stressful on a physical level if nothing else.  The actual tube change is no big deal generally, but the anesthesia is, and so is going into the hospital and waiting and never knowing if an emergency is going to bump you up to a later procedure time.  The Interventional Radiology room (sort of like a very high-tech operating room) is frequently used by ER patients coming in at random with emergencies, so scheduled procedure times are rarely predictable.  This also can make for stressed-out doctors and nurses, which sometimes causes friction.  I’m hoping for minimal friction today though.

I’m also going to be walking in on foot, a complete first for going to this particular hospital campus.  If I can’t handle it, especially after waking up from anesthesia, they tend to have tons of wheelchairs just sitting around that I could borrow.  So it’s not too much of a risk.  But I’m trying to walk as many places as I can nowadays, just to see what I can do. 

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