Tube Yoink

I’m not a very happy camper. It all started last night around 11:00 or so. I was totally asleep on the couch, (probably pretty comatose, I was sooooooo tired) and Bran was next to me watching Season 3 of Lost. My tubage was hooked up to the supplement, and it was dripping away, as always. Suddenly I shot up, legs akimbo, arms flailing, and started coughing the Dying’s Cough. I was hacking and spluttering, and I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get air. Well, finally the fit passed, and I zonked back into my Zzzzz’s. Well, it couldn’t have been much longer after that, when a coughing fit seized me again. I’d never coughed like this, I couldn’t figure out what was happening. The burping and retching and choking...the Boost in my throat…it was hard to catch a breath…and then it hit me: SHAZAM! The tube had migrated from my stomach to my lungs. So all that lovely supplement was being leaked in some vital organ that it was so unwelcome in. Was I absorbing these calories? Where did they go once I coughed them up? Back to mi estamogo? I know not. Once we figured this out, though, Bran immediately turned it off, and I felt better.

I twisted and pulled and pushed the tube around, and I hoped it was back in my stomach. Well, today’s been weird. It’s been hurting me even more than usual, making me cough and sneeze and talk funny and be short of breath. I thought, suck. It’s probably in or near my lung(s) again. So on my break I took a grocery bag with me into a stall, tugged a little, and it sort of just slithered out on its own into the bag. And I feel amazing!

But it didn’t take long for the amazingness to wear off, and guilt replaced it. What would M and H (my treatment team) think and say about this? I was already concocting all sorts of reasons why I didn’t need the tube anymore, and I let myself build up an irrational hope that they wouldn’t replace it. So I paged H, and she called me back, and the home health nurses are coming tonight to put it back in. She called me at work, and I fled to the bathroom to cry.

I’m just so sick of this.
The world HATES me.