Day 4--Red Spots and Puzzle Art

It was a relatively quiet day. Torger got some platelets in the afternoon (thank you, anonymous platelet donor!) and about a half hour afterward some red spots appeared on his forehead, ears, and neck. This is the kind of symptom they watch for carefully, so they retested the platelets remaining in the bag to make sure there was no problem. There wasn't. They gave him some Benadryl and the spots settled down. Dr. Tse stopped in just to check on things and told us a story about a former patient who laid in bed for three days then got pneumonia and died. We hear a lot of these cautionary tales, and they're actually very helpful because, while it might be easy to forget a simple instruction about spending too much time on your back in bed, it's really hard to forget the story about the athletic guy who died after spending three days lying around.

We watched an old "Jack Benny" episode and worked on the latest 1,000 piece puzzle in the solarium. We did start to wonder about the art that's on a lot of these puzzles. Does someone paint the picture first, or does the puzzle company say, "Give us kind of a lame painting so we can chop it up into a puzzle"?