Flushing The Line

I have to flush my central venous line every day. I got some new syringes preloaded with the right heparin-saline mix so it's actually pretty easy to do in a technical sense. A little rubbing with some alcohol swabs, connect up the syringes, and squirt away.

But it's hard psychologically. There's always a lot of air in my tubes - they're clear and the bubbles and voids are easy to see. There's no good way to get the air out, so I have to push it in, and it takes a bit of willpower to knowingly depress the plunger and watch all that air go straight into my circulatory system. I'm told that it takes an awful lot of air in the bloodstream to cause any particular problems, but still, every time I do it I can't help but think of air embolisms and The Bends - not to mention worry if somehow an errant cat hair got into the works and is going to go on a cruise around my circulatory system for a while.

It doesn't help that practically every time I flush my line I come down with a dull headache. What could be causing that? Air? The heparin? Stress? Maybe I don't want to know.

But all of this leaves me in possession of approximately 90 preloaded syringes, and about 120 clean, empty syringes. I'm trying to figure out a way to use them in home repair or craft projects. Maybe built some quasi-Egyptian water pump out of 100 syringes and a wooden crankshaft. There has to be some use for them. (None of them come with steel needles, just the goofy thick plastic "safety needles" whose chief function seems to be to squirt heparin into my eye when I try to express the air bubbles, so I can't actually use them for any injection-related purposes.)

I had my PET scan last week and will presumably get the results this week. I can still feel a lump in my groin so I'm still at Stage I at least. I knew it was too much to expect for the ESHAP chemotherapy to have cured me. According to the statistics I read, it does have a small chance of effecting a complete cure, emphasis on small. And of course, it proved to be too much to hope for that I would have fallen into that small chance.

But I'm plagued by a different problem today. I have three USB thumb drives that I keep various documents, pictures and other geedunkery on. When I got my new computer I consciously put the thumb drives in a safe place, so if the worst happened and the transfer of my junk from one computer to the other went south, I'd at least have the thumb drives to fall back on. Trouble is, I can't remember where I put them. Oh, it's a safe place, all right, so safe I can't find, and don't think I haven't looked. I have a very vivid memory of having seem them only a couple of weeks ago, but the memory does not come with location information. It could have been on Mars for all I can remember. I think it was in the garage, but that doesn't make any sense either, as the garage isn't a particularly safe environment for electronic devices.

But hey, it's still more fun than watching The Next Iron Chef. I've come to detest that show with a heartiness that I'm sure isn't healthy, and is probably immoral to boot. It even colors my perception of Alton Brown - he seemed like he would have enough sense to steer clear of such a train wreck, but there he is, in it up to his elbows, as culpable for that mess as the rest of them. The only thing worse is Chopped, which to my mind has become stranger and even less palatable with its new season. I guess it's endless repeats of Barefoot Contessa and Tyler's Ultimate for me, and you know what? I'm okay with that.