Waiting for the Phone to Ring (Or the mail to arrive)

 

For those of you that are old enough, receiving snail mail was one of the top moments of the day. You just never knew what was going to be the in the mailbox. More often than not it was mostly junk mail and bills. However, for me, 12-year-old John Churan, the Holy Grail would eventually make its way to the box and I was in heaven for days. Twelve-year-old John was a baseball playing wizard that loved everything about baseball. I collected baseball cards, I played rec baseball, I played pickup baseball whenever there was a chance.

But above all that, I read the Sporting News, the bible of baseball publications cover to cover. Every Thursday during the summer I would literally park myself in a chair behind the front window waiting for the mailman to drive up to our mailbox and drop off the mail. He was generally regular at about 2:20 PM but that sure didn’t stop me from going out at 1:30 and begin the countdown.  When he did get there I wouldn’t walk to the mailbox, it would be a full out sprint. This little newspaper gave me a weeks’ worth of knowledge that I would digest like a rat in NYC and a piece of pizza. Of course, like everything in life, even the Sporting News would disappoint and not have a very good article on my Reds and all that anticipation would come crashing down.

Today I had my little disappointment when it came to today’s running of my schedule.  I receive dialysis three days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  On Monday they basically took me from a sound sleep at 6:05AM and for the next 4ish hours cleaned my blood and removed 2 ½ liters of fluid. Most people believe that dialysis is just about cleaning the blood, but it has a secondary purpose in removing water as most dialysis patients no longer urinate. On Monday they pulled me into the dialysis unit at early and as a result, didn’t get a chance to get into my routine of taking a shower, put on clean clothes, brush my teeth, etc. As a result, I skipped the shower and felt cruddy all day.  So today I got up at 5:30 cleaned up and sat there waiting for my dialysis trip to get started just like waiting for my Sporting News. Instead, they hooked me up to an IV and gave me a unit of platelets as they were too low at my 4AM blood draw. It wasn’t until noon that I would finally get to my dialysis. I topped that off when I got back to the room with 10 laps around our pod of 10 rooms. I’ll order up some dinner and hope that the knife is sharp enough to cut the meet.

So overall it was a good day. Still feeling pretty good despite fighting diarrhea. We will see what tomorrow brings.