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Oh we have patients pull them out all the time! Sometimes the doctor will go in to talk to them and say “Oh, we can stop your iv fluids now.” and the patient will pull out the IV themselves and the fluid will still be coming out via the pump!

Listen...sometimes they’ll stop the IV fluid and put on a “saline lock”. Sometimes they call it a “Heplock”. That just means they can cap off the IV with a special cap that can be accessed only as needed. So say you need to get IV antibiotics, but you don’t need IV fluids otherwise...they can hook you up, give the antibiotics (usually over an hour) and then disconnect you, flush the port and you aren’t shackled to an IV pole.

Did I tell you how beneficial it has been that Empress the DMV is there with mom being hospitalized and all. For example with they moved her between wards her nose feed tub got clogged. The doc sort of mentioned it in passing like ‘it happens sometimes’. Emp spoke up and said ‘well that only happens if someone does not blah blah blah like they are suppose to.’ Chopped him off at the ankles. If she and the other Vet (whose horse mom was on) were not there when she fell she would not have survived they had to manually keep her airway clear of her tongue as she was convulsing. What delayed her recovery a bit was the fact that her tongue was so swollen for the first few days that it would not fit in her mouth.
She is doing a lot better now. Might be out of the rehab hospital soon.
She is up and about and functional and has her strength back. But she is not at 100%. Short term memory is not 100%, conversation tends to take strange jumps. The other day she told be dad, in a panic, that they had to get out because they were surrounded. He of course told her there was nothing to worry about because he knew a secret passage. And she asked Empress once how the magic guerilla bombers were doing. She is making stead progress though, just a bit more on track every day.
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