Here’s a fun thing about wound vacs: they beep. When something’s wrong, they beep. And when you’re trying to figure out why they’re beeping at 6am on a Sunday, you get to discover exactly how helpful your healthcare system is after hours. Spoiler: not very. So I call the on-call number. Thirty minutes later, the doctor calls back. And I get the medical equivalent of a shrug: “I can’t help you with that. Call tomorrow and they can help.”

Cool. Cool cool cool. That was the plan anyway. Thanks for the thirty minutes of waiting to hear what I already knew. I ask if I should at least take off the dressing and put on a dry one instead of leaving the sponge sitting there not doing anything. The response: “I don’t think so?”

Question mark audible. Confidence not detected. This is the on-call doctor. The one you call when things go wrong.

So I do what any reasonable person does when the medical system fails them: I call tech support.

The wound vac has a 24/7 customer service line. For the product. And the person on the other end of that call - the one whose job is to troubleshoot a machine - gives me clearer medical guidance than the actual medical professional did.

“Yeah, you don’t want to leave the sponge on without the vac running. Take it off, put on a dry dressing.”

Tech support. Saving lives. Or at least wounds.

Here’s the part that’s hard to write.

I don’t know if those hours with the vac not working right cost me anything. Maybe it’s fine. Maybe the healing is on track and this was just a weird Sunday morning blip. But I don’t know that, and nobody could tell me, and now I get to carry that worry until my next appointment.

And we’re tired. Sarah’s up at 6am with me, helping me track down numbers, helping me figure out what to do, being my second brain when mine is foggy with pain and frustration. She shouldn’t have to do that. I shouldn’t have to do that. We’re supposed to be healing - me physically, both of us from the stress of all this. Instead we’re playing medical detective because the people whose job it is to help couldn’t.

That’s the part that’s unfair. Not surprising - we stopped being surprised by the healthcare system a long time ago. Just disappointing. And exhausting.

I don’t have a nice ending for this one. The wound vac is off, there’s a dry dressing on, and tomorrow I’ll call the actual wound care people during actual business hours and hopefully get actual answers.

For now, I’m just sitting with it. The worry. The frustration. The absurdity of a healthcare system where tech support outperforms doctors.

At least the beeping stopped.