And Then The Roof Fell In

If you look out my bedroom window a few hundred yards to the west, you will see a big chunk of the Blue Pacific over the heads of the dazzled Torrey Pines golfers. At Scripps Green Hospital, I'd rather have a room overlooking the main parking lot because the Internet signal is so much better on the land side of the hospital than on the water side, but, then, I never claimed to have a balanced set of priorities.

I've been trapped in these lovely surroundings since last Friday by bedeviling low-level fevers whose cause originally was thought to be an activated cytomegalovirus (CMV), which indeed, I seem to have. However, after much testing, the fevers turned out to be sneak attacks from a sneaky sinus infection (locatable only by CT scan). Apparently, I've had the sinus infection for quite some time. On the plus side, Ivonne and I may soon be able go home after we learn to infuse me with the two or three I will still need (Ivonne, by the way, has a roll-away bed in a corner of room N-358). But I might be in hospital longer now that I've earned accolades from the staff for vigorously walking around the facility (and re-breaking L2 in the process, the very vertebra that was supposedly repaired by kyphoplasty more than a year ago).

To fight the CMV, I was given an infusion of Cytogam. That infusion swiftly gave me an episode of artrial fibrillation (A-fib), with my pulse at 174 but with normal pressure. Now I wear a radio device that continuously reports my vital statistics. While no one thinks I'll go into A-fib again, there's another opportunity to see if no one is right coming up soon (there's another Cytogam infusion in forty minutes or so).

On the plus side, the food is better here today than it was when I had my aSCT here in September of 2005.

But enough about me. I must mention my aged brother (he's 67) who has diabetes, congestive heart failure, high blood pressure, stage 4 lung cancer (NSLC) and a leg shortened by a motorcycle accident in Italy many years go. Last week he broke his leg again. The femur this time. Joe is one of the rare individuals whose NSLC has not progressed in something like three years.  Need I mention that this injury is tragic?

There's more, but it will have to wait. My new pain killer, MS Contin, is taking control....

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