No matter how complicated something appears it is only made up of parts that can be understood as smaller systems.

I made a deal with the devil to get out of the hospital.  The devil is in the details.  

Note to self, brain surgery and rocket science are just complex systems.

I had to learn how to give myself an IV drip.  After many hospital stays, I had a pretty good understanding of how that works. You put a needle in the vein tape it down. plug in the IV drip and eat your cookies for an hour or hours.

Doing it yourself is a whole new story.  First off there are no cookies or anyone to help you.  The pharmacy that supplied the gear sent a nurse to show me how to do it.  She was strict and thorough.  I had the attention span of a flea having just gotten out of the hospital with a new appendage.  She had seen this situation before and wrote out all the steps on the lid of the cooler my supplies came in as if it were the 10 commandments carved into stone.

Back my story up 24 hours.  In the hospital, they could not let me go because I was losing too much of my precious bodily fluids.  I have not been able to keep up on my fluids for a long time.  But they could not let me go with this condition because I would just end up back in an emergency room.  The deal was I could go home if I could IV myself on my sofa.  I agreed.  I had promised my husband I would be in the big house over the weekend and I was already into my second weekend.  The biggest part of this deal was having a pick line installed.  It's an IV line that goes in your upper arm and ends up inside your shoulder.  On the outside, it splits into two plastic connectors for home use.  It did not hurt.  The spot where it goes in was tender for a day or two.  You can't get it wet so showering is an issue.  The prognosis is that two weeks of self hydration should give my body time to adjust.

Back to the present.  The visiting nurse from the company that provided the home supplies showed me all the clamps and connectors that the at-home system employs.  There is no needle to stick.  It works more like tinker toys. There are spring-loaded mates on either end of the parts of the system.  There is a pole on wheels that an IV bag hangs from.  Next, there is a long line that connects the bag to my arm "pick line".  This line has a little drip chamber at the top so you can see how fast the bag is dripping and a dial to adjust the speed.  Beyond this, there are two kinds of preloaded syringes with matching spring-loaded connectors like all the parts use to keep the two lines attached to my "pick line" clear.  One is a saline solution and the other is a blood thinner to keep the line from getting scabbed over.  The Pick line is supposed to last me the whole time I am doing this procedure.  There is plenty of extra syringes in case of any error.  It all comes in a neat little styrofoam cooler.  Everything is fine at room temperature.

The first two days I tried to do the drip during the day.  It is supposed to run for 3 to 4 hours.  Since it is gravity feed it really only works if I am laying down on the lowest sofa with the stand extended as high as it will go.  My original attempt to sit up and work at my computer while it dripped left me with low flow.  After four hours I had only drained the bag by half.  So I started laying out the rigging before bed and getting up at 3 or 4 am to run my IV while semi sleeping on the sofa.  I feel like this is the way to go.  Trying to navigate my apartment with the whole rig in tow was silly and cumbersome.

The trade-off of learning to run this system from home means I don't have to stay in the hospital eating soul-killing hospital fare.  Getting up once at night to plug in over getting woken up every two hours for some kind of blood draw or to get my vitals checked.  Watching bad cable TV and enduring a complete lack of wifi.  A trade well made. My devil dealing detailed solution will be over in a week.  After that, I am back to more active exercise and hopefully job interviews.