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| Easter Sunday, April 15, 2001 Happy Easter! This is the first Easter I have ever spent away from home-and alone. I am certainly willing to do it, though, considering I�m not at home because of treatment. My dad came and picked up my mom last night. Since I am not suffering from any side-effects she decided to go home. My dad and brothers need her more than I do right now. (clean clothes will be hard to come by if she were away from home any longer, ha ha) My treatments are going well. I have managed to wake up in time to give myself my morning IV at 10 everyday. I have IVs every 12 hours, 10 a.m. and 10 p.m., which work very well with my schedule. My IVs are given to me over the period of an hour. It is really something interesting. I hook the IV bag up to a machine that is set to give me the 500-mg equally over an hour. I haven�t mentioned this before, but the amount of ganciclovir given is determined by a math equation using your weight, which only makes sense. You wouldn�t want to give a petite 5�2� woman the same amount that you would give Shaquille O�Neill. It seems crazy that I haven�t explained what I do to give myself the IV everyday until now. I think I�m just going to walk you through exactly what happens, I have an instruction paper here that I�m gonna copy off of: 1. Clean your work area (I just use a clean towel) 2. Gather supplies: medication bag, IV tubing, sterile cap for end of IV tubing, saline flush syringes, alcohol wipes, pump, tape, trash bag 3. Wash hands 4. Open tubing. Untangle. Close clamp. 5. Pierce medication bag with tubing spike. 6. Open clamp and purge all air out of tubing (which means pushing all the air out of the med bag and letting the medication fill the entire tubing). Close clamp. 7. Place tubing in pump (there is an attachment area on the bottom of the pump for tubing). 8. Turn pump on. 9. Cleanse injection cap with sterile alcohol pad. Flush with 5-10cc of saline (to flush catheter of anything that may get in it between treatments). 10. Remove protective cover from tubing and screw into injection cap. 11. Open all clamps. 12. Start pump. END OF INFUSION: 13. Wash hands. 14. Stop the pump. Close all clamps. 15. Disconnect tubing from pump. Immediately place sterile red cap on end of tubing if you will b e using it again (I use one tube everyday-so I use it for 2 injections). 16. Clean your injection cap with sterile alcohol pad. 17. Flush with saline (to get all the med out of the catheter). 18. Store pump as instructed. |
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