I go to pieces

Just when I thought I had seen it all, my trach showed me Wednesday morning that I still have a thing or two to learn about living with fake body parts.

After climbing into bed around 11 on Tuesday, I tossed and turned for hours, unable to get comfortable enough to sleep.

For one thing, Dr. B1 had re-dressed the wounds on my face on Tuesday afternoon, and I didn't have a lot of confidence that the bandages were going to hold through the night. He held the dressing in place with a single strip of tape; when I replace my own dressings, I all but lock the bandages into place with long strips of duct tape.

Also, Dr. B1 replaced my trach collar with one that felt differently around my neck and I was having a hard time getting used to it.

Finally, my left eye was popping open every five or 10 minutes, which kept a dream that I was having about Jon and Kate Plus 8 from getting under way.

I finally drifted off to sleep around 3 a.m.

About an hour later, I woke up after my nose rolled over something hard and smelly. To my alarm I saw my trach on my pillow —not only the removable plastic cannula that fits inside the trach, but the trach itself. And the trach collar was dangling from my neck.

I bolted out of bed, ran to the bathroom and put all of the stray pieces back inside my neck, where they belonged.

What happened? Beats me, gang.

Maybe one of Jon and Kate's Plus 8's brats were monkeying around with the trach in the dream that I had. Or maybe I had removed the trach to slip under my pillow so that the Trach Fairy would come visit.

I haven't checked the commodities listings for Fake Body Parts lately; a trach with less than a year of wear might yield five or ten bucks in today's Fairy market.

Whatever it was, I can't risk lose any of my fake organs just because I can't get to sleep at night and start clawing at my body in a reckless, willy-nilly fashion.

Tonight, I'm giving my G-tube the duct tape treatment.