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3:30pm August 15, 2014

Whoever sent me the drainage bag is a saint.

Seriously.

You don’t know how much I need those, and how much I have to get by on one, hoping it won’t break.  Ideally I have two, so that if one breaks I have a backup.  Often I have to do horrible repair jobs that leave them leaking bile all over me at night.

They’re generally around $80 a piece (unless I can occasionally find them highly discounted on eBay, but that’s pretty random), which is more than I can usually afford.

They’re supposedly single-use only, but nurses have taught me how to stretch them out for months… until they start rupturing.  Which can happen in a couple weeks, or a couple months, you never know.  And sometimes the rupture can be dealt with, other times it can’t.  It all depends on where it is on the bag, how big it is, the shape of the hole, and what kind of repair tapes I have on hand.

Weirdly, the bag that lasted the longest is one we call the “Frankenstein bag” because I made it out of the tube from a gravity drainage bag attached with silicone tape to a hole I cut where the drain port should’ve been in a drainless suction drainage bag.  (Someone had ordered me the wrong type.  The kind without a drain are useless to me, because if I can’t drain the bile out, I can’t reuse them.)  I expected that one to fall apart quickly, but it lasted practically forever compared to most.

So I can’t thank you enough, whoever sent the drainage bag.  I know drainage bags and medical gloves aren’t as “fun” as some of the items on my wishlist, but they’re a huge part of my monthly medical expenses, so the level of gratitude I have here can’t even be properly expressed.  Like… my staff person was here helping me open the bag and when we saw what was inside, we just gaped at it for a minute, because we knew someone had paid a lot of money for something very important to me, and… I’m almost crying, I can’t believe how nice that was.

Note: If you can’t afford to do something like this, don’t feel guilty, and don't try to afford it for my sake.  I’m just amazed that someone who could afford this, actually did it.  And it’s eased a lot of my financial worries this month, because I have practically no money left till the end of the month (possibly, actually, none, in reality – I’m bad at telling how much autopayments I have to go) and only one drainage bag at the moment, so…

So very happy about this.

And also grateful to anyone who would do this if they could.  Because I know what it’s like to want to help someone and be unable to.  And that counts for a lot, too.