We’re home again and man am I looking forward to my bed tonight!!! Joel is an amazing little guy, he did really well. There is a lot of not so fun stuff involved with being at the hospital, but he gets through it without much complaining at all. He is very sensitive about his port a cath, he doesn’t want anyone touching it at all. That includes me; I have to be very careful when bathing him and dressing him, not to touch it. When they access it and check on it he grimaces moans and sometimes cries, but other than that he is fine with it. Once it is accessed he doesn’t mind the meds going in it or being hooked up to the IV. He even tolerates all the yucky oral meds well.

Sleeping at the hospital doesn’t bother Joel in the least… as for me it is a different story. I have complained about the lovely pull out chairs before. Well this time the plot thickened…. just before bedtime Joel’s roommate’s Dad asked me if I sleep on the chair or the mattress.

“MATTRESS???? Oh I don’t know anything about the mattress.”
“What no one ever told you about the air mattress you can get??”
“No.”
“Oh, well tomorrow you’ll have to ask.”

I looked on with a hint of envy as he inflated this large comfortable looking mattress for his wife before he left. All night long I kept thinking about the air mattress.

The next morning I did some digging and found the mattress connection. When she dropped it off she mentioned that on my side of the room it just barely fits between the bed and the wall. It is really almost unfair that there is the good side of the room and the crappy side. Easily, the side of the room with the bathroom and the window is twice the size of the other side. I was figuring out that Joel and I have spent (not including our time at Ronald McDonald house) about 63 nights in the hospital. Out of those nights only 3 have been spent on the cool side of the room.

Not to worry though I had my air mattress and our roommate was headed home and Joel and I were promised the good side, woohoo. Well that was short lived; our nurse came in and apologized because the next boy coming in would be staying longer so he was getting the good side. Slight disappointment but I had my air mattress it would all be okay. I would just have to crawl across the mattress to get to the end to get out of it. Joel wakes several times through the night with an urgent need to use the bathroom, as they run a lot of fluid through the IV at a high rate.

I am not sure why, but our new roommate’s Mom pushed her bed in between Joel’s bed and her son’s bed leaving me maybe 12 inches to shimmy between the 2 beds to unplug Joel’s IV. It took some fancy manoeuvring to get the IV pole out from between the 2 beds. Of course this all happens in the semi darkness of the hospital room in the middle of the night with Joel in a panicked state.

Add to that…that shortly after getting into my cozy bed I realized that my beloved air mattress must have a slow leak. For those of you who have never met me in person it is suffice to say that my middle would be where I am heaviest so that is the part of me that began to sink into the air mattress as my head and legs were raised higher and higher. Now try and picture me trying to scoot to the end of a deflating air mattress quickly to get Joel to the bathroom. What a sight not to mention the shimming between the 2 beds after my flailing and flopping across the not so beloved air mattress. Then consider that this crazy scenario repeated itself about every 2 hours with the exception that as the night wore on, the air mattress continued to deflate.

Praising God for my comfy cozy bed that won’t deflate.