Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Cellulitis

Here's a picture of the and in my husband's hand. We went to the hospital at midnight and got home at about 2:30, so I had another night of no sleep.

There were lots of appalling things about this hospital trip, most notably, that I got to watch the doctors give him a morphine shot in his arm. It was upsetting to me that the nurse giving the injection didn't notice the scars and track marks on his veins. I guess that's not her job, though.

They also gave him some IV antibiotics, some antibiotics to take home, and some fucking Vicodin. I hope he isn't home snorting them. I hate this. I hate the way if he's in pain, I'd rather just have him hurt than take pills. I hate the way I am at work, and I should be going on about my day normally, but I'm mostly just worried that he's at home snorting pills like an ass.

I also found it really frustrating that he didn't tell the nurse that he had been using heroin. In his mind, because he's only used once in recent weeks, the infection in has hand can't have anything to do with using. I think this argument, however, is pretty much like arguing that because you never caught chlamydia a few years ago while you were whoring, it isn't possible that you caught chlamydia from the one night stand with a scabby stranger you had last week.

From the article on abscesses I posted yesterday, it's clear that there are lots of ways that using even one time could cause soft tissue infections. It feels important to me that he acknowledge that this is another consequence of his using. It is also frustrating because this is another week that he's going to be unable to work, unable to make money, and unable to contribute. We've got another mortgage payment coming up, and I guess I'll be making this one on my own as well.

He did some tattooing at the house over the weekend, and I asked him if he'd made any money doing it. He told me he hadn't, and also insisted that if he did make money, he's going to keep the first $50 for himself. I don't understand how he can think that keeping the money is ok. I could see keeping $10 for miscellaneous things he might need, but as he's only mustered up $25 in the last two months to give me as his contribution to our household, it seems like he ought to give me the whole of whatever he makes.

I am so disheartened. We were doing well for a little while. I don't know how much more of tis up and down I can take. Last night, especially after the morphine injection scene, I had all these thoughts of leaving...like just LEAVING, right then...leaving him at the hospital in the middle of the night. Letting the doctors keep him. He's broken. I don't want him anymore. And then I had a fantasy of taking him to the homeless shelter, dropping him off with a bag of his clothes.

I know he can't help that his hand is infected...or he could have helped it...he could have not shot up last week...but he did, and now he's suffering the consequences.

And once again, so am I.

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