Happy Father's Day +25

It has been quite busy around here the last couple of days. When we got home on Thursday, we were met by Sheila, the nurse from Health Back, to administer Stevan's antibiotic and train me on how to give it. We had another nurse come in at 2am and yet another one at 10:30am on Friday to watch me and make sure I would be able to handle the process.

The kids and I got up Friday morning and went to fill six prescriptions for Stevan and pick up his Father's day gift. We then had to beat it back home to meet up with the nurse. It was then back to Broken Bow to pay some bills, run some errands, grab lunch, go to the bank and finally to the grocery store to get food. Stevan ventured out with us, but wore a face mask to protect him from germs.

We had a couple of different people come to visit on Saturday. It was nice to catch up with friends and family, but Stevan was worn out and had to take a nap. It was pretty much a lazy day the rest of the afternoon for us.

Today we were able to attend church this morning. Stevan wore a mask, a bandanna around his head and hand sanitizer in his pocket. It was nice to be back and have everyone welcome us back home.

We came home and celebrated Father's Day by eating goulash, giving Stevan a big candy card that the kids made for him. It was too cute not to share, so I've posted some pictures of it.

I have been administering Stevan's medicine to him since Friday afternoon. It is quite an ordeal. I have to first clean the ends of each line then flush both with saline. I then hook up the IV to the pump and to Stevan's central line. It runs for 1 1/2 hours, which I then disconnect him and flush both lines with saline again. I finish by placing heparin in both lines to keep them from clotting up. I do this every 8 hours.

We have been adjusting the times slowly to keep from having to dose him in the middle of the night. We have finally gotten it to 5am, 1pm, and 9pm. We can deviate about 30 minutes so we can move the times a bit if we need to from day to day if we need to adjust when we give him his medicine. Tonight as I was trying to get him set up, the pump kept giving me an error. After restringing the tubing a couple dozen times and still getting an error, I finally called Walgreen's after hours number. Guess what, our pump has gone out! WHAT? Are you kidding me?

Temporary solution: figure out how to adjust the clamp to get 15 drips a minute. After several tries, I think I finally got it. Final solution: they are to have another pump here for us by noon. I sure hope so! I don't like having to do this part. I'm afraid I'm going to screw it up.

I'm going to close this out for now. I have a lot still to get done around the house: get the weed-eater out around the house, weed my poor garden so that I can walk through it with out being afraid of snakes, till the garden, and begin picking squash, tomatoes, peppers, okra, corn, and beans. I will continue to keep you updated, but it might now be every day.