The 23rd & 24th; I'm expecting to be disappointed.

The 23rd of April. Oh god I have never been so excited about the fact that it is Monday tomorrow. Maybe my four month long saga of the fat right arm will be over soon.

Somehow I managed to press the snooze button this morning without my knowledge, but I didn't continue to sleep for too much longer. I think I was slightly less coughy, but I had Zopiclone so it's hard to remember. Thankfully the rest of the day has not been necessary to remember anyway.

Shockingly, it's been mostly tv. Sunday Brunch in the am, Netflix this afternoon. I had a break in the middle for my traditional Gardeners' Question Time and a lie down/pretend nap, but that was pretty much my only non-screen-based activity. On Netflix, I watched the first two episodes of 13 Reasons Why. I think I'll download the next several to watch while I'm having to lie flat in ambulatory care tomorrow.

The 24th of April.

So it is done. I am praying so hard that it has worked this time but honestly I'm expecting to be disappointed.

Mommy woke me up for toast at quarter to seven, and then I couldn't go back to sleep. I managed to kill time until we had to leave by redoing some crochet that I'd done wrong, and we set off just after 10:30. Parking was a nightmare, but we drove round enough times to chance upon someone leaving. Before going to ambulatory care, we went up to 516 to give Jenny her bear. She was delighted and put him in her pocket. We couldn't stay too long, so we had a brief chat, then we went back downstairs and she went to check patients' blood sugars.

I checked in at the desk at ambulatory care, then had to wait until the afternoon patients were let in. While we twiddled our thumbs, we saw Vash, the mother of a girl I was treated with at BCH. Turned out she was in a cubicle in there with some mystery virus. She did not look well, poor thing.

I had a very nice nurse who liked my hair (actually nearly every person I met commented on it) and got admitted pretty quickly, then a nurse from angio came for me because I was the only one on their list this afternoon. When we got down there, I went through the theatre check list again, and Andrew came for a chat. He explained what he was going to do, and we talked a lot about gadolinium (the dye he has to use instead of the iodine-based contrast he normally would), because I have so much during these procedures, more than a patient who's had a lot of MRIs, more than anyone he's ever seen and there are no studies on how this much of it can affect a body so he has concerns about that. I am just tired, I want it fixed.

We went round to the suite we were going to use. I shuffled across onto the bed and there was a who, then Andrew went to scrub in and the nurses prepped me. Covered in iodine. Once everything was set up, Andrew ultrasounded the edge of my groin to find the vein, then one of the nurses came to distract me while he got stabby with the local anaesthetic. He tunnelled up as far as he could, then he put some local in my fat arm and drove a wire up the vein in there so the two nearly met, and he used them to measure the blood pressures in those vessels, and he did a run of contrast so he could see if any strictures were there. The one he blew up in January had returned, so he was going to have to inflate that again, but with a better balloon this time. Before doing that, he wanted to use the IVUS to make sure there weren't any more, and to get some more information about my superior vena cava. I could see the screens today, so I can tell you that an ultrasound inside your veins looks like the title sequence of Doctor Who. Like going into a black hole. From this, he was able to glean that there isn't any more narrowing, but it is scarred. Lines for seven years will do that to you.

Satisfied that I only needed the one inflation, he gave me some sedation (they are not comfortable experiences) and I had a tiny nap. Then all the tubes and wires got pulled out and I had to lie there while he pressed very hard on the puncture site to stop the bleeding.

In recovery, I had some water, then the nurses took me and my notes back to ambulatory care. Mommy was coming back in at the same time, so we both returned to my bedspace and I told her what had gone on. Andrew came round too, and we talked through what he'd seen. He also explained that there's no point in strenting the vein he inflated because it's surrounded by bones and fibrous tissue so would probably just get crushed. I have to keep wearing the sleeve and squeezing the stress ball, and hope that this time it's had the desired effect. I'll get an appointment for his clinic. Maybe I'll be able to wear something that doesn't drown me.