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Wednesday, November 02, 2022

THE ONGOING FUN OF DIALYSIS AND ITS ATTENDENT CAR SERVICE TRIBULATIONS

Today was pretty much a shitshow across the board.

My car to dialysis is nearly an hour late. I called the dispatcher and they said it was a fuckup on the driver’s part. Another car was sent but no ETA could be given. I finally got picked up at 10:05, and the driver took different route “because traffic,” but we ended up stuck crawling on 3rd Avenue thanks to delivery truck gridlock. I didn't make it to the center until nearly 11, which meant that once I was prepped and the dialyzer was in action, my projected end time was for 2:40pm but it didn't end until nearly 3.

Along with my car being over an hour late for my morning pickup, the center was understaffed to a ridiculous degree. I have no idea why, but there were only four nurses to handle thirty patients, and I fell into the care of a visibly harried Tanya, as Shaunda was absent. She had several others to attend to before me, so my finish time would be close to 3pm. I endured the usual 3 hours and 49 minutes on the machine, and just before it was over I noticed goopy, coagulating blood on the mat below my fistula arm. 

I did not call for assistance as my treatment time was about four minutes from the end, but when she saw the blood, Tanya felt terrible. As she took care of it and cleaned me up, she admitted to half-assing my prep, having forgotten to apply the gauze wadding the goes over the band-aids that comer the needle entry points before binding ahead of the dialyzer starting up. She been so harried by running around from patient to patient, she simply forgot. I told her it was not big deal, but the poor sweetheart was beside herself.

Then, once released, I ended up in the downstair lobby and called the car service to inquire about when my ride home would arrive. I was told ten minutes, but when twenty had elapsed, I called again and was once more told ten minutes. The car ended up being forty minutes late, and I was positioned in the front passenger seat because I yet again got stuck with a triple pickup. Those are always awful, as they take forever because they always take the other passengers deep into Crown Heights of Flatlands and I am always the last to get dropped off, but also, especially when ludicrously late like today, the car ends up encountering the start of rush hour traffic, and god help us if we have to take the highways or any of the major avenues in my area. Needless to say, we were subjected to slow-moving congestion, a state made all the worse by the fact that one of the two passengers behind me was strongly redolent of stale urine.

After dropping off the other passengers in Crown Heights, the driver made his way to my neck of the woods, but the queue of cars waiting to take the exit for Park Slope's 3rd and 4th Avenues was about a half-mile long, so he instead opted to drive to industrial Gowanus and make his way to my area. I'm glad he did because while on the way we passed a building on some street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues called "The Vulcan," and its black entrance was decorated with what to the untrained eye looked like filigree decoration, but I, a geek, immediately recognized it as the Vulcan font from STAR TREK. I have no idea what it said, as I do not read Vulcan or any other fictional language, but now I intend to eventually swing back over there and photograph it so I can use a guide to translate it. It likely just reads "the Vulcan," but I am curious to have a concrete answer...

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