Bob's Blog 3-5-16: Miss Me Yet?

Bob Here.

I remember the day I told the charge nurse in my dialysis center that I had decided to start training to treat at home.

This, of course, meant that, when my training began, I would no longer be a charter member of the regimented M,W,F first shift brigade, and that the in-center staff would no longer be subjected to my childish tomfoolery and misbehavior, which was manifested in direct proportion to the degree of dialysis-level boredom I was feeling on a particular day.

Just a week or so prior to my big decision, that same nurse was over fiddling with my lines during an excruciatingly long treatment.

"Did you ever think about free will?" I asked her.

"What?"

"You know. Free will. Determinism. Whether our actions are controlled by a causal chain of events, some external influence, or whether we actually make up our own minds?"

She just rolled her eyes. "Uh, no Bob. I haven't thought about that lately."

"Seriously though. Scientists all say that atoms and particles behave in probabilistic ways. Well, our minds are made up of atoms. So how can we truly say we have free will?"

She was looking at me like I should be locked away somewhere. "You know, most patients ask me how their venous pressure is running. Or how much time they have left in their treatment."

"Well, I was just wondering if we're all here because of some predetermined set of interactions among the atoms and particles in our minds."

"No," she said. "We're all here because the second and third shifts are all full." Then she started walking away.

I called after her. "But if we don't have free will, what's the point in participating in the passage of time?"

I heard her say, "My passage of time is slow and painful right now. Mostly thanks to you."

So, when I told her that I was going to try home dialysis, I half expected her to start break dancing in the middle of the treatment floor. But she just thought for a few seconds and finally said, "You know, I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but I'm actually going to miss you around here."

Of course, I still had a couple of weeks before training began, so the next day, I was all hooked up with nowhere to go and I challenged my neighbor patient sitting next to me to a free throw shooting contest using the waste basket sitting about five feet away.

At first, the guy looked at me like I was nuts.

Then, apparently, the dialysis-level boredom took over his thought process.

"What will we use for a ball?" he asked.

I had a magazine that I brought with me, so I tore one of the pages out, crumpled it up with my free hand, and sent it sailing to a perfect, nothing-but-net, three-pointer right into the basket.

Of course, I hammed it up with an imagined crowd noise and high-fiving my invisible teammates.

The guy looked amused, but he still hesitated to participate.

I ripped another page out, crumpled it up and tossed it over to him. "Your turn," I said.

He took his time perfecting his aim, tossed the page and it hit the side of the waste basket and rolled away.

"Pfft," I said. "Amateur."

"Wait," he said. "I didn't account for the wind."

I crumpled up my nose. "Wind? In a dialysis center?"

"Yeah. There are people in here talking...and breathing. It affected my shot. Gimme another one."

So I did. He took a really long time setting his aim. Not wanting to miss two in a row.

I said, "If you don't shoot pretty soon we may all get called for a transplant."

"Don't rush me. Don't rush me."

He finally took his shot and made it.

"One to one," he said.

"What? We're keeping score?"

"Of course. How do you have a free throw shooting contest without keeping score?"

Then my competitive nature kicked in and we made a big scene of shooting crumpled up pages, cheering our successes, and making lame excuses for our misses.

"I felt a cramp coming on..."

"The light was in my eyes..."

"Mary across the way moved while I was aiming..."

And so on.

Even other people sitting nearby were watching. And of course, everyone was laughing it up and being loud.

"Ahem."

I heard what sounded like our nurse trying to get our attention. I looked up and much to my horror, she was standing there with the regional dialysis center auditor, a woman who had no discernable sense of humor and the mien of a prison guard in Alcatraz.

My neighbor and I just kind of froze in our seats. We were waiting for the two to go about their business, but they just stood staring for what seemed like an eternity. I had picked up the magazine to rip out another page, but instead, I turned the page and pretended to be reading it.

Somehow, I don't think they were fooled.

The auditor came over, picked up my chart and, as if nothing unusual had happened, said, "So," she looked down at my name, "Mr. Northam is it?"

Now, I have several evasive shticks that I use when I don't feel like talking, where I fake narcolepsy and seem to fall asleep mid-sentence, or pretend that I've forgotten how to speak English. But I didn't have the nerve to put any of those in place at this point. I figured I was in enough trouble with Nurse Ratched here.

"Uh yes," I said. "I mean, yes Ma’am. In the flesh, ha ha..."

Not even a hint of a smile. "How is your treatment going Mr. Northam?"

"Well, I thought I hit a bit of a cross wind with my last shot..."

I looked over at our nurse and she had bloody murder in her eyes.

"Uh...I mean...fine...fine Ma'am. Everything is just fine."

"I see," said Ms. Personality. She put my chart down with a thud and the two of them continued making their rounds.

Later my nurse came over to enter some readings on the terminal next to my chair. She looked down at me and just shook her head.

I just looked up at her smiled, and asked, "So, miss me yet?"

We all know the old saying that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it might actually turn out that the absence is really the best part after all.

The first day the wife and I reported for our home dialysis training, our training nurse sat us down and reviewed some basics. We were to train for four weeks and do all our five-per-week sessions right there in the training room.

"We'll get to know each other very well by the end of your training," said the nurse.

The wife muttered, "Oh boy" under her breath while she eyed me out of the corner of her eye.

Now, it's been well documented that my being around machinery could sometimes be recorded into a disaster film documentary of sorts, and it seemed that the two training dialysis machines were no exception.

The first day we walked into the training room, the machines started beeping with errors.

"That's strange," said the nurse as she walked over to reset them. "I've never seen them just do that on their own before."

"Yeah, this is a new one for you Bob," said the wife. "Usually you actually have to start working on a machine before you mess it up."

Now, although we successfully completed the training and have been treating at home for a few years now, to say the training had its glitches is a bit of an understatement.

The first time I tried to set up the machine on my own, the flood was so bad we almost had to call FEMA to the scene.

My first attempt at putting my own needles in went so badly that afterward, I heard the nurse wonder aloud to herself what other kinds of work she could have gone into.

And one time when I was gathering supplies to bring over to the chair, I tripped over my own feet and sent the gauze, tape, syringes, test tubes, needles, gloves, and placemats flying, some of which plopped down on the poor training nurse who had been sitting nearby, minding her own business.

"Holy crap," she exclaimed. "I should get combat pay for taking you on."

So, after we started at home on our own, I had the occasion to go back to the training center to pick up some supplies.

I saw our training nurse sitting in her office and I barged in and said,

"So, miss me yet?"

Thanks for reading. Take care.