Husband's Log - February 14th, 2026

 Yesterday Angela and I started our day off early with a field trip to Hospital Puebla to get her catheter placement.  This catheter gets put into her chest and is used for transferring her stem cells out of her body.  On the way to Hospital Puebla, we passed a large mall featuring a childhood relic from a bygone age.  I had to do a double take just to make sure my eyes weren't deceiving me as I was astonished at what laid before my eyes.  It was a Sears department store, alive and well.  It warmed my heart knowing the children of Puebla could very well still sift through the pages of a thick Sears Catalog Wishbook and circle all their Christmas wishes for mom and dad.  I know it's hard to believe, so I attached a photo below to prove the existence of this prehistoric retail conglomerate in the wild.

Once we arrived at Hospital Puebla, we all admired the beauty of this grand medical facility.  It was glass all around like a Bank's head office, with a nice Starbucks on the main floor.  As we left the van, we were provided wheelchairs for our patients and pushed them through the hospital to a nice waiting area.  I was so tempted to stand on the back of Angela's wheelchair and ride it like a kid with a shopping cart, but I imagine that form of top tier entertainment is discouraged in the medical community.  In the waiting area we needed to sign a few Spanish documents before we could proceed.  Like every end user presented with a licensing agreement, we just blindly accepted the documents and hoped for the best.

 After about 15 minutes, each patient and caregiver was led to a private room in the maternity ward of the hospital.  This room was big for a hospital room, like a single bed hotel room.  It featured a hospital bed, couch, recliner, tv, several cupboards, and a large 3 piece washroom with a nice shower.  Once in the room, a nurse came to visit to ask Angela a series of questions and quote on quote "practice their English".  This hospital is a private hospital primarily for the local Pueblans, so the staff rarely need to speak English.  They must have really wanted to practice their English because there were lots of questions, several of which seemed irrelevant to catheter placement.  Like the previous interrogation Angela went through in our first days at Clinica Ruiz, the nurse wanted to know her level of education and occupation.  Now I'm really starting to think one's schooling affects the outcome of their HSCT treatment.

Soon after the questions, Angela was taken away on a stretcher.  I low key feared we signed away Angela's kidney to the black market, but alas there was nothing I could do about that at this point, so I sat in the unnecessarily swanky hospital bed room and wrote the February 12th-13th blog post.  Two hours later, I was happy to see the hospital returned my wife in one piece and gave her some expectantly shitty hospital breakfast featuring apple slices and Jello.  It also featured a beverage which almost had a flavour but really didn't.  It was like liquid depression in a cup.

Upon her return, Angela told me she went to a mysterious room surrounded by young doctors, all introducing themselves to her in Spanish while poking her veins to find an optimal candidate for catheter placement.  She was then knocked out with strong drugs while the procedure took place.  The doctors advised the strong drugs would make her feel good until around 5:00pm yesterday, then she would hurt like hell.  Once we returned to our home clinic, we just ate lunch and watched Ted Lasso for a while.  Around supper time Angela was in great pain like the Doctors' predicted, so we got some more painkillers from the Nurse station to help alleviate it before bed.  We also acquired four extra pillows of varying comfort from the housekeeping staff to create a comfy pillow barricade on the bed to keep pressure off of the catheter side of Angela's body while she slept.  She went to bed early as we would need to wake up at 6:00 AM February 15th for a blood test.