Dear Diary,
I can say that with full conviction, I would like to have a totally boring day. One in which so little happens that even sleeping and YouTube become too boring for me. And that even though I love to sleep.
To complain again in bad old fashion: Why am I so often criticised for sleeping? It's my own business if I want to get up at 4:30 a.m. and get back to sleep at 11 a.m. Quite apart from the fact that I would rarely, if ever, get up of my own free will after just 90 minutes of sleep. That will usually have other reasons, causes and triggers. Let me put it this way...
No. It's not because of my hair that your mask is almost always crooked.
No, if it were my hair, your colleagues would have to have similar problems with it. But they simply don't have them. There are plenty of other difficulties. But not this one. And as sorry as I am, it doesn't even top the current hit parade of masks:
- The back headgear is pulled down to the neck. Sometimes the mask presses so hard into my face that my upper lip, cheek and nose are at risk of decubitus. That's true, it happens. I didn't know that such a thing existed on the face. It's not a problem for two reasons. Firstly, my back bones are hurting again anyway. A little toothache more or less doesn't matter any more. And secondly, the headband in my neck strangled me in five minutes anyway.
- Everything is too tight here. LOL, I know very well myself what I once said. Age is a matter of tightness and hey, tight is a stretchy term. Doesn't apply to CPAP masks, unfortunately. High tightness without leakage only comes about when everything fits properly. Over-tightening is counter-productive.
- The nostrils in the mask are designed for the nostrils of the nose. It is still a mystery to me why almost everyone is inclined to put the tip of their nose in there. It just makes no sense at all.
Outside of the rating, of course, the classic occurs regularly when putting on the mask. Right off the bat, everything fits like a glove. But instead of paying attention to me, to my facial expressions, my eyes, my eye signs for "damn it, let me write" or instead of reading what I've written, the mask is frantically tugged back and forth until nothing fits at all. But woe betide anyone who says anything. Then there are only two reactions from nurses that I know of. The start of a heated discussion about why it's my fault anyway - as if it was ever a question of blame - or crying and tears. I must be such a bad person, the madness.
To wrap up the subject of sleep, I just really like sleeping. As Jake Harper used to say in my favourite show:
I love to sleep, sometimes I even dream about sleeping.
Recently, I have been confronted with more and more questions of great significance. PEG, cannula, desire for a child. No one before me has ever mentioned these three terms in the same breath. Wink smiley. But that's exactly the thing. No, I'm not talking about the horror film from 1982, although it's really worth seeing, as I can remember. I bought the original uncut version on VHS when I was a kid. This particular one from the hmv store in the UK. But no, let's show a bit of seriousness here again. In the face of such questions, perhaps it explains why I am weary of some other discussions. I don't mean that in a bad way. Many things that others are enthusiastic about simply don't interest me at all. Football, for example. Other topics, on the other hand, that you probably wouldn't look at with your arse, captivate me for hours. The more the underlying disease progresses, the more pronounced my black and white thinking becomes. I guess it's natural selection. The shorter the remaining life expectancy, the more pre-sorted.
But let's take another step back. What must have happened here to make my jaw look like that? A moderately severe beating. Of course, I tell everyone that my dog hit me awkwardly #insider .
At least I'm not in pain. With all the experiences of the past weeks and months, this is something new. Something positively new. However, this also meant that I was not aware of the explosive nature and severity of the bleeding in my mouth. To be honest, I didn't notice it at all for the first half day. If it hadn't been mentioned in the evening, before the handover, I would have continued to assume excessive saliva production. Only the deep red secretion in the suction container, which looked black in the dim living room light, should possibly have made me sit up and take notice. At the evening handover, it slowly dawned on me that perhaps not everything was as well as I had assumed.
Shift change. Change of scene. The night shift has taken over. He doesn't like what he sees here at all. Actually, I need a doctor. I'm not in the mood for on-call duty and emergency doctors. They send me to the emergency room by return of post every time anyway. Which is total nonsense, because I'm a ventilator-dependent intensive care patient. I belong in intensive care. Where there aren't two nurses looking after 20 emergencies. And where someone realises when my machine sounds an alarm after another tube has been pulled out and fallen off. I have already experienced one or two shock moments there. Großhadern emergency room, for example. A real blast, I tell you. They push me into the chamber on a metal table, as if from an autopsy. And they all run away. I raise the alarm. Nothing happens. It's worth a story on its own, this trip.
I write to my GP and ask for a visit.
Good evening dear practice team, I'll be in touch tomorrow as soon as I'm up, but I wanted to check in first... Since brushing my teeth this morning, I have been bleeding gums all the time. There are also constant drops of blood forming between my teeth, which are extremely uncomfortable to the touch, and my nurses think that these are also made of tissue. Wherever this could come off in such quantities. Can someone come and have a look at it? Kind regards Patrick Ruppelt
What follows is a more or less sleepless night.
I often claim that my brain is incapable of forgetting what I have seen. I guess there are a few exceptions to the rule. Undisputed number one: oxygen saturation SPO2 ≤ 76. That's pretty freaky. In my last such experience, I was probably still mostly lucid in the head, but I don't remember myself what happened after the drop to less than 76 counts. I'm supposed to have explained what to do, where the oxygen was and all that stuff. But I don't remember that. It would be of academic interest to recreate the situation in a supervised experiment. My motivation to relive acute respiratory distress in this form is stupidly limited. Let's foam.
Closely followed in second place, acute lack of sleep. Now the question is, of course, whether I am actually forgetting things or whether I have no longer recorded them in my memory due to overtiredness. At the most, they might have been transferred to the ultra-short-term memory and from there directly to /dev/null. The result is the same: I know that in the morning I apologised to my nurse for the shitty, no, bloody night (note the pun). That's it. Finito. That's all that's left of the night.
But bloody, oh yes. Not only this night was bloody. We are in for some exciting, frustrating, interesting and sometimes relieved hours. Only to find that we are plunging into much more far-reaching problems.
