That sucked....literally

So....headed back to the hospital today. They wanted to drain the fluid from around my lung. I headed in at 12:45 for a 1:00 appointment. After waiting for half an hour and watching two pregnant ladies come and go I headed to the lab to get blood drawn. They needed to check my INR and make sure it was at or below 1.5. Of course it took forty minutes to get the results back. We headed down to radiology, where they were going to do the procedure to wait. After about an hour they came back with my results and sure enough my INR was 1.5 on the nose. It was game time.

They took me back into the room with the ultrasound. They use the ultrasound to see where the fluid is and to guide the giant needle into my back. I was sitting up on the edge of the bed with my arms resting on a table. The doctor was behind me and telling me what was going on. After he did a cursory check with ultrasound to see where he was aiming things started to get fun. First he took a lidocaine needle that was described to me later as "not that bad" and ran it around a couple inch circle to numb everything. The doctor described it as a pinch and burn. It definitely pinched and burrrrrned for a few minutes. Once everything was numb things were much better. Now that he was done with the lidocaine he took a second needle that was around five inches long and ran it into my back into the fluid sack around my lung. He then hooked a hose to the needle and put the end of the hose into a bottle that was vacuum sealed so that it would suck the evil liquid from my body. And boy did it suck. After probably only a minute or so it really started to hurt. It started to hurt because there was no fluid left for it to suck and it felt like it was trying to suck me through the needle. So they pulled the huge, giant needle from my back and all i got to show for the whole deal was a little band aid. They did show me the fluid afterwards. It was something like 650 ml. Over half a liter. Think of a one liter soda bottle half full. That all came out of me. It's crazy to look at. You wonder where in the hell there was room for all that.

Things are pretty much back to normal now. After the whole deal I was a little sore while my lung tried to expand into the new space. Feels like a knot inside your back. Not a knot in the muscle but deeper than that. My back is still pretty tight but that should go away soon. Just one more adventure in what is becoming a long list of trips to St. Joes.

Hopefully that is the last trip I have to make besides follow up appointments and cardiac therapy that starts next week. They say it's not all that uncommon to have to be drained more than once but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I will be a one and done patient.