1. Today Nurse Jenn from the Transplant Clinic messaged me. All my test results from Friday's labs are in and she told me that my numbers looked stable and that I should only make one change in in my pillbox. We've been fiddling around, in a good way, with my dosage of the magnesium supplement I take, seeing if we could lower it and if I could, in turn, increase my magnesium levels through the food I eat.
Today, Dr. Poudyal decided I should take two more pills a day than I have been.
She also decided that I could have labs drawn once every three months, a significant change after many weeks of weekly, bi-weekly, and, more recently, monthly labs.
I'll have labs drawn in February in advance of my February 19th appointment with Dr. Bieber. He comes to Smelterville that day.
Then I won't have bloodwork done again until May in advance of my May 11th appointment when I see the transplant team on the second anniversary of the transplant.
I'm also having more specialized labs drawn at Sacred Heart every three months, labs that cannot be done at Kootenai. I'll go to Spokane for one these batteries of tests this week on Thursday the 15th and will have them done again in early May one the same day I have the standard labs done that I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
I will be very happy if the rhythm of my post-transplant treatment and monitoring becomes defined by bloodwork every three months with office visits scheduled as needed.
2. Once I put that small pile of notes, written on carefully cut rectangles (around 5" x 4") scraps of papers in a basket with other things I put out of sight for family dinner, for a couple of days I might as well have dropped them into a twenty foot deep empty well. Not only were they put away, they were hidden and I'm terrible at finding hidden things.
Today, though, I felt like I'd scored a tie breaking World Cup goal when I found them. They are back out in the open again, a reference to consult for words that have not been Wordle solutions, reminders of things I need to get done, and listing daily tasks like feeding Gibbs and Copper, taking my pills every 12 hours, and other things that, as important as they are, I am skillfully and expertly capable of forgetting.
3. In the first part of Lonesome Dove we see, through the perception of a greenhorn named Newt, two herds of horses, one going north, the other south, collide into one another and create a stir of chaos and confusion before sunrise that makes useless every means Newt has of knowing what's happening in front of him. It's a coming-of-age event in Newt's life, one that challenges his romantic imaginings of what it would be like to round up horses (or cattle) and move them across the north Mexico terrain into the south of Texas. This one event does not form Newt into a full adult, but it's an early start of that process.
Larry McMurtry's sharp attention to sensory detail and his plain spoken and poetic language in this passage is consistent with what makes his prose style as arresting to me as the novel's story.
No comments:
Post a Comment