HulkSmash veins
No one bothered to tell me that this iron infusion thing? Takes five hours.
FIVE HOURS.
Really, this seems like the kind of information it would be useful to share with a patient when setting up the appointment.
Thankfully, I did have the foresight to stop for coffee on the way to the clinic, even though I was a little nervous I'd be late (I wasn't). Uncaffeinated, I would've handled the situation with a lot less equanimity. As it was, all I had with me were a half-charged iPhone and iPad, so I was able to get a little work done, but not nearly as much as I'd planned for today. (I had such big plans!) And reading about breast cancer (for a research project I'm working on) while surrounded by people undergoing chemotherapy is, well, humbling and mind-screwing, to say the least.
The bag looked like someone had scraped the rust off an old pipe and dissolved it in water. It was fat and heavy to start with, and emptied at an agonizingly slow rate. (Five hours!) When it was almost to the end, the nurse came over to empty it out, upping the dial so it flowed more quickly. It felt like cold metal seeping into my veins. I thought I might be imagining it, because it seemed so bizarre, but the nurse asked, "Does that feel cold?" It was like magic. Then she flushed me out with saline, because otherwise, the iron apparently sits in the vein close to the insertion site (my hand), turning it bright green. Which I though sounded kind of cool, but didn't say that out loud, because sometimes I try to act like a grown woman instead of a ten-year-old boy.
Maybe next time, I'll ask if we can leave it without the saline, just so I can see it turn green. Because, c'mon, HulkSmash veins! (Sometimes, the ten-year-old boy is irrepressible.)
On top of losing all that time, I came home, ate everything in the world--since that morning coffee was the only thing I'd ingested all day--and then crashed into a coma on the couch for a few hours. Apparently, being pumped full of iron is less work but just as exhausting as pumping iron. Who knew?
All of which is why this is going to be a shortish and low-calorie entry, because I have a boatload of leftover work to do, having spent the better part of the day kind of literally tied up, with only a half-charged phone and iPad. Although because I have better friends than I deserve, I did procure a charger after a few hours, so I wouldn't be stranded on an electronics-free island listening only to the sound of the pump, the soft-soled scurrying of nurses, and the occasional trill of a machine in need of attention.
So, instead, I'll leave you with this picture I finally got around to taking of the ghetto lights on my patio:
