Thanks, Ann - Deborah is off morphine this evening and on Vicodin for
pain so things are looking up  ;-)

She's getting IV antibiotics q8h and last night the needle slipped out
of her port while she was sleeping and deposited about 200ml of fluid
under her skin so until that gets absorbed her port is useless - there
isn't a needle long enough to reach the damn thing now  :-(

They're applying heat to the area to help speed things up a little so
maybe they can use the port tomorrow and take the needle out of her
arm.  All in all she's in good spirits and wants to come home, but
they think now it'll probably be Sunday or later before she can do
that.

hugs to all -

allan

Your kind thoughts must have worked, annie - she came home yesterday
;-)

The trip home wasn't completely uneventful, though.  Dr. Smiley was
off for the weekend and a guy named Dr. Shen released Deborah from the
hospital with a script for oral antibiotics.  I drop the script off at
the corner drugstore and take Deborah home to get her settled in.

After about half an hour I head back to the corner drugstore to pick
up the script and the pharmacy tech tells me the pharmacist wants to
speak to me - so the pharmacist calls me over to his little window and
tells me it says in his records that Deborah is allergic to
penicillin.

When I confirm this the pharmacist tells me the antibiotic she's been
prescribed is contraindicated for people with a penicillin allergy.  I
ask him to hold the script and head home and call Dr. Shen's service.

I explain to the doc that my wife is allergic to penicillin and that
the pharmacist had flagged the prescription.  Dr. Shen asked me if I
would look up the phone number to the pharmacy (he was on the road)
and said he'd call in a new script.

When we got everything straightened out I decided the pharmacist was
my new best friend, thanked him profusely and went on my way.  I still
don't understand how Dr. Shen could miss a penicillin allergy when
Deborah was wearing a yellow band with the allergy clearly listed on
it while she was in the hospital.  If it wasn't for the pharmacist's
sharp eyes (or the sharp eyes of the computer he used) I'm pretty sure
Deborah would have landed back in the hospital.

Anyway, I'm still a bit unhappy with the state of medical care in our
town.  In one two-day stay we had three errors that just shouldn't
have happened.  Two were infusion errors (note to self:  Don't allow
IV meds when the patient is sleeping) and one was what I'd thing was a
fairly serious prescription error.

After the incident where my FIL received two days of Heparin he didn't
need I'm beginning to see these people need to be watched pretty
closely.

Oh, well.  At least she's home now and in a few days she'll be right
as rain  ;-)

hugs to all -

allan