DePICCted
This morning Lotte drove me in to Mount Auburn again to get my Neupogen shot and PICC line flush. This time I also got blood drawn for testing.
Then we spent most of an hour in the waiting room, reading comix Sara had lent me for my hospital stay.
When I went into Dr. Weissman's office she was beaming. "All your counts have gone up enormously," she told me. "I'm taking you off all restrictions and having your PICC line removed. Your blood is in better shape now than when I first met you last month."
I floated on my cloud of relief back to the nurse's station, and watched in queasy fascination as she snipped the stitches holding the line in place and, with tweezers, slowly drew out inch after inch of slender white tubing, first clean than increasingly bloody, for about a foot. The moment it was out, blood started to well from the hole, but I held a gauze pad to the spot for five minutes, and I was ready for a band-aid and a trip home.
On the way out, I commented to Dr. Weissmann that the sight had reminded me of stage magicians drawing endless paper chains out of their mouths. "Wouldn't you have been surprised if there'd been a flower at the end?" she said.
On the way out the door, I leaned down and pressed my hand against the landscaping's mulch, symbolically beginning my re-engagement with dirt and crowds.
Now the band-aid is off, and three little pink dot on my upper arm are the only sign of the tube that was in me for three weeks