the story so far

[mimesere]

My sister has been discharged from the hospital and is at home now. She is all set up in our downstairs living room with the hospital bed they sent over and the oxygen machine and just piles and piles of medication and needles and our kitchen is filled with um, bags of some kind of IV infusion. So far, I have learned to take my sister on and off the IV, change the infusion, take blood sugar tests, and administer shots of I-don't-know-what. all of this is fine, really, truly it is. It's not particularly difficult and I'm relatively good with it, but it's stressful as all hell and it gets worse when, as happened this particular weekend, I have three people -- including my sister -- screaming at me that I am doing it wrong and don't I understand that if air gets inside the tube she's gonna die and I just want her to die and get away, don't touch, they don't trust me to do it correctly, why didn't I just wait for the fucking nurse to come. To which I responded that it was *fine*, they could do the shots and the bag prep and the IV hookups and everything because *clearly* I could not be trusted to follow simple instructions and oh, also, THEY TOLD ME to change the bag and that's the only reason I did it. Then the nurse did come (too late for the disconnect) and said that my other sister had done a good job disconnecting the bag. No one apologized or said anything.

I am taking a brief leave from work, I think, with the possibility of going to part-time until whatever happens, um, happens. There's no one else to do all the things that need doing and my mom can't and my brother who finally came back from Iran and my sister who is going through the nasty divorce and my other sister who has huge problems of her own can't be here all or most of the time and I'm just...stuck.

Comments

[mimesere.livejournal.com]

Work gave me a brief absence and I'm going back on Monday part time, so that part worked out well enough.

And things have to get better in some way or another.