Day 30 of hospital stay.

Let me goooooo. Let me gooooo. Monday is the new potential release date and if they don't let me go, I may start singing at the nurses desk until they get annoyed enough to kick me out.

Everything is now in the hands of the infectious diseases doctors who are being annoyingly cautious and want the official negative report from my last blood culture. When they take a culture, they want it to be incubated for five days before they officially declare that it's negative (of course, every day that nothing grows, it's negative so it's fairly safe to assume that if nothing is there on day 2, nothing will show up on day 5). Once that happens, they will switch me from IV antibiotics to oral and then I can go home.

At first I was told they wanted to wait five days from my Sunday cultures, then it turned into five days from my PICC line culture when they pulled it on Monday. Then it turned into five days from my Wednesday culture. They took another culture on Thursday but I'm hoping that since all of the cultures have been negative since Sunday, they won't feel it necessary to wait for the Thursday one.

The infection is what is keeping me in here but in the interim, I had my PET scan. It happened over at the VG which meant a fun transport ride over and back in the ambulance. For the scan, they injected me with the radioactive glucose solution and then I had to wait an hour for it to get into my system. Unlike what the Internet said, I didn't have to drink 2 liters of water during that hour. It's shocking that the Internet lied to me. The scan itself took about 20 minutes in which I fell asleep. It was not very stressful.

The results from the scan were 'nothing unexpected and no surprises' according to the doctors. It all looked the same as the CT scan which is good news. No surprises is a good thing in my life right now.

So my first infusion is tentatively booked for Dec 10th providing I'm off the antibiotics and nothing else happens. It seems far away but really it's only a week and half.

I also managed to see gynecology since I'm waiting around. They returned from wherever they had disappeared. After all the waiting for them, they've decided against the IUD. Well, more the resident said she wasn't convinced that the argument for having it was greater than the risks so if I wasn't set on it, they weren't going to push me to get it. I jumped on that and said not to put it in. My hemoglobin has been fairly stable and the resident said if I get a fever with the transfusions than the first thing the doctors will want to do is remove any source of infection. Which would be the IUD. I really don't want to go through the pain of having it put in only to have it pulled in a month. Let's reduce as many things as possible that has side-effects as I seem to catch them all.

That's all that's happened the past few days. Hopefully this is my last weekend hanging out here at the hospital. My thumb IV blew Friday morning at 1 am so now I have one in the back of my wrist which is no less painful but less awkward when I want to do anything, like text or wash my hands.