Hospital - Day 2 - Food!

The day started early with the removal of the catheter. Mt., my first male nurse explained to me how it was going to work, one guy to another. "The women nurses don't understand, they think you got to be all slow and careful. It just lengthens the pain. Trust me, it has to be done fast." What am I going to do about it; it's 4am, I've got painkillers in the system and very limited movement. "Ready". "OK" I say wearily bracing for the worst feeling of my life. "Done". "Well that wasn't so bad", I say and it wasn't, not painful anyways. Like quickly taking off a band-aid. There's an initial feeling, but after that it goes away fast. "Now imagine if I had done it slowly" said Mt. with a dumbfounded question mark towards his colleagues of the opposite sex. "I'll take your word for it" I say and put my head down to rest.

At about 8am, breakfast showed up. It wasn't much, cream of wheat (or the like) and a single whole wheat toast. I hadn't eaten in two days, but I wasn't ravenous. I just knew that eating something was a good idea. Since I was in chemotherapy I have always associated the sensation of hunger and the capacity to eat with feeling better. If I'm not feeling good and I'm not hungry, I still have a ways to go. As soon as that first thought of eating or that little gurgle develops in the abdomen, things are getting better. I ate the breakfast and immediately started to feel better.

With breakfast down the hatch, mobility returned (sans catheter) and somewhat of a clear head I went back to the bed. M. and my parents arrived soon thereafter. When all you do is lie in bed, drop in and out of sleep, have small conversations and submit to the hourly nurse attention (blood, pressure, temperature, medication, etc.) time goes slow. Real slow. My bed faces a clock and every time I would wake from a dose I would see that the clock had only moved ahead ever so slowly.

Lunch was soup. Some kind of soup that had the gelatinous consistency of porridge. I just hunkered down and ate it. The "Food Lady", as she became in my nomenclature, came by and picked it up. She wasn't very conversational and as I learned during my stay, the "Food People" are a quiet people. Again, I wasn't ravenous, but eating made me feel like I was recovering. I was still in that ridiculous hospital gown, I still was drugged on pain killers, I still had all kinds of IVs, my blood pressure was still really low, I was still swollen all over and my chest still hurt; but, I was getting up under my own steam and I was sitting at a chair and table and eating. Eating "real" food.

The Food Lady dropped dinner off around 5pm. Not a word, not a smile; just a forced walk into the room, a sigh at the fact that my table had stuff on it, a small grunt as the tray slid onto the table and a laboured walk back to the corridor to deliver the next tray. "Thank you!" I say... Nothing. Not unfriendly though, just absent. Dinner was soup and pasta. I ate the soup, but could not eat the pasta. I had some fruit and more apple juice. All in all not a big calorie day, but 3 meals down and the satisfaction that my body was back to creating its own energy.