TUBE TROUBLES

I made a small dinner party last night and everyone stepped on my oxygen tubes  -- and why shouldn’t they?  I step on them myself.  They trail behind me like a bridal veil as i walk around my place, taking care of business, doing what I do.  The 50 feet of clear plastic tubing gathers in coiled piles in narrow hallways and all over the place, and gets stuck and caught in every place it possibly can.  If there's a hook or a corner, my tube will find it. 

At one point during dinner I noticed Kay’s chair leg sitting directly on the tube and asked her to free it, please.  Then I forgot about it until about 4 hours later when I lay back to sleep in my bed and noticed my heart beating in a noticeable way.  Not pounding but working hard enough for me to notice.  Checked my blood oxygen and found it to be 84, too low, and I wondered why. 

Emergency!  Pulled the cannula out of my nose and stuck it in my mouth; no air.  Then I remembered the chair leg on my tube and realized I’d gotten no oxygen for hours, including while I finished my work in the kitchen after my guests left, and all the time i watched TV in bed.  No wonder I felt so tired.

Jumped up and checked the concentrator; it was working fine and big bubbles broke the surface of the water in the humidifier.  So oxygen was coming out of the machine but not getting through the tube.  Tried to stay calm and proceeded to open each little part to discover where the air was blocked.  I learned that no air was coming through to the water trap, so it had to be the tube.   

No time to inspect, I grabbed a new 50 footer from my supply drawer, and connected one end to the humidifier bottle.  Oxygen flowed through but now I had 100 feet of tubing on the floor in front of me, coiled & curled, and the new one in in so many coils and knots I couldn’t smooth out.  I managed to separate out the old tubing and kicked it away down the stairs, but still needed to straighten out the new tube if I wanted to move.   

It took much too long to untangle the tube, and without getting oxygen, but eventually I won and went back to bed.  My oxygen level was now 97.  I wonder how much damage I did to my organs during the time they were oxygen deprived.  At least my heart had calmed down.

So that's life these days.  Thinking about it now I'm lucky to be alive, because I could have simply fallen asleep and been without oxygen all night.  And dinner was appreciated by all.

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