Talked with the doctors about my auditory hallucinations brought about by usage of dilaudid. Not unexpected or particularly unpleasant, but not what is desired since the amount of painkiller that I can take and not space out or sink into low state where I don’t care about anything anymore. They gave me a pill that lets me take a higher dosage and allowed me to spend a relatively pain-free night, pain perhaps 3 on a scale of 1 to 10. This 1-10 scale is a scale that every one uses and is very subjective. Then, this morning, Dennis called. I said hang-on and hoisted myself up in bed to turn on the light, and I realized I did not have a cell phone in my hand. I had had another hallucination.

[1:00 pm]

Mo’s here. Just took a shower and Lisa is hooking me back to the IV. Voice very harsh – I sound like Don Corleone.

Coughing continues to be a problem for me. The Teflon pearl seems to help a bit. Trying to get enough dilaudid in me so that the pain is reduced, but would prefer that cough is reduced, but I would prefer that the cough go away forever. Appetite continues mediocre and threw-up. I’m left with a cough. Lisa is going to get me a patch that will dry me up. Not sure that thus will do anything, but I’m willing to try.

Drank the frappe and Boston cream pie. I do not have the taste for anything salty. I am preparing a stash of muffins and Boost that I can order that I can eat later.

Temp is high so I can’t have any blood. Will try to get some sleep.

Falling behind on posting the blog entries. The last posting was day 15 and it is now day 17. I am in a lot of pain and need to be able to take a lot of naps.

I am making a list of what works and what doesn’t work.

Drug Name	Period	# of pills	Purpose
Teflon pearl	3 daily	1	Cough
Saline mist solution	4	Squeeze	Keep mucous membrane soft.
Nystatin	4	sufficient	Mouthwash (gentle)
Alkalol	4	Sufficient	Mouthwash (gentle)
Dyproxa			Reduce effects of pain.
Dilaudid			Control pain
Nexium	2	Three times a day.

Also, have not updated the hemo report spreadsheet actuals from last night (and printed today.)

Will turn in now. Waiting for my temperature to drop so they can give me my blood. The temperature needs to be in a certain range since high temperature makes undesirable side effects of getting blood hard to identify.

Dr. S and J said that the blast # should be zero, because these are the cancerous cells. Original counts of cell are by machine, so they looked at them personally under the microscope and determined that they did not appear cancerous. So this begs the question, if they are not cancerous and not any of the reported types, what are they?

[4:30 pm]

More system safety.

• Overloading poles with bags of meds to be delivered later makes them unstable. Stability is one of the driving design factors of the pole and it’s being overridden. This is just a single instance of a well-known engineering problem. If you build a system with certain passive controls built in, people may be tempted to take advantage of them. You see this in the Big Dig too. The Big Dig was built to allow better traffic flow through Boston. While this may have happened on some routes, it seems to me that the main effect on others has been merely to increase the number of cars on the road and the congestion has remained the same. I’m sure there are numerous examples from aviation but I can’t think of them now.
  
• Variation between hospital staff and equipment and what is measured and how. I had my temperature taken by two different people at two different locations of the body. There are four of them, mouth, left axillary, right axillary, and a fourth that I won’t name – suffice it to say that it has a different color sheath, red as opposed to blue used for the other three spots. I sure hope the person taking my vitals is not color blind! Theoretically you should be able to add one degree to the axillary temperature to yield the oral temperature, but this just that, a rule of thumb, not a real rule. There’s also no reason that both axillary temperatures need be the same. Anyway, as I said, I got three different temperature readings all taken at the same time: 98.5, 99.8, and 94.8). These values show considerable variance. The number entered in the book was the median. The reason that the axillary temperature was taken in the first place was because it was thought that the mouth temp could be abnormally high because of the local hot spot.

Good night’s sleep and woke refreshed. Feel much better and stable. Before I went to bed last night I scanned my emails from the cell phone. It seems that the CSC laptop is coming. Also, from DPT, a newsletter giving me the scoop on the latest Volpe happenings, including JNH’s announcement that he is moving on from the Volpe Center (I can’t imagine that he’s going to stop work altogether – wake vortex is so much part of his life.) Also John LoBue’s sudden departure (verrry interrresting…)