It was a bleak Wednesday in mid-January. I had waited all
day to be called to theatre. It was one of the longest days I’d known. Washing
and gowning for surgery seemed a long and distant memory at 8am. I lay, firstly
patiently, and tried to focus on reading magazines or talking to friends and
family on the phone, before eventually starting to lose the plot as to whether
or not my surgery would be cancelled. I was rapidly losing hope, then at just
after 5.30pm, theatres called for me and I went down to surgery and I was
delivered to the anteroom. I remember
thinking how old fashioned this theatre looked compared to the previous
hospital. I just hoped that all the equipment would be working well and that my
anaesthetist was competent enough to keep me under and pain-free. I wasn’t
worried about my surgeon who I liked and trusted very much. I asked to count
backwards from 15 and probably got as far as 8 and my next memories are of
being intensive care in the early hours of the next day.
I remember feeling as if I was in a moving boat which was
tipping forward and backward and side to side, yet I never arrived at shore. I
couldn’t stop it. Around me were huge tables slanting at an angle, a bit like
the type that architects use. There was
one nurse attached to each table and presumably patient. I couldn’t see the other
patients. I could see windows and a clock, but not make out the time. I
believed it was the early hours of the morning. My nurse gave me some orange
tasting medicine and shortly after I vomited. I remember flashes of incredible
pain and then passed back out into a halfway of nothingness or altered
consciousness, back on my moving boat of a bed. Eventually dawn broke and I was
a little more aware of things. A physiotherapist came over to me and asked me
to cough. It felt a barbaric request when my abdomen was so sore from the
surgery of the evening before. I apparently had to do this to try and clear my
lungs from the anaesthetic. That torture being over, there were a few other
things that the physiotherapist wanted me to do, but I just thought that the
requests were in my wildest imagination. Not long after that I think that the
team changed shifts and then I heard that a patient who had a cardiac arrest
needed an ITU bed and they needed to find the least ill patient to move to a
ward . Just before noon on Thursday I was moved to another ward to the one I’d
been admitted to and they tried to make me as comfortable as possible with my
Patient Controlled Analgesia pump (PCA). Not long after I arrived I was
violently sick of what can only be described as bright green liquid, the colour
of mouthwash. I lay back in bed and tried to doze feeling incredibly sorry for
myself and moving just a centimetre caused agony – let along trying to cough.
A few hours it happened again and I vomited up more
bright green bile – something from a Science Fiction film. When it happened a
few hours later for a third time and anti-sickness medication was not helping,
I was told the only way forward would be to have a nasogastric tube fitted. I
think this just about finished me off. A spray was put up my nose or some gel whilst
the nurses tried to force a straw up one of my nostrils, and failed one side,
the other nostril, accommodated this vile tube that went down the back of my
nose and into the back of my throat making me want to gag. I felt strangulated
and that there was a hard straw at the back of my throat, and I felt as if I
was choking. I think the tube lasted no more than twenty minutes before I
begged the nursing staff to remove it. I remember them reminding me that I
would be likely to continue vomiting, but I decided that was almost the lesser
of two evils. I asked for my regular anti-sickness medication which I took
orally and was careful to avoid swallowing too much water or saliva and finally
sleep overcame me and I wasn’t sick again. At the same time I disconnected my
PCA because I thought it was the Fentanyl making me sick and I went cold-turkey
with no pain medication.
The next morning more tortures lay ahead. A
physiotherapist came over to me and said they were going to try and get me
standing up. I was given a metal frame to hold, like the ones that older people
are seen with. I felt this was the final indictment to my street cred. I very
slowly managed to walk to the bathroom and was able to clean my teeth and wash
my face – I didn’t need the toilet because I still had a catheter insitu. I had
a wash and changed my hospital gown for one of my nighties and then had a
massive shock as I saw the size of my swollen belly. Even though I had been
slim three days ago, I had rolls of fat around my belly and a sunken belly
button covered in white tape/padding and one horizontal to my pubic bone which
was about three inches long. I was shocked as I hadn’t noticed this new assault
before. I looked and felt like a whale, and remember feeling terribly depressed
and that I would never feel the same again.
Later on in that same afternoon, two days post-surgery, I
was feeling wretched as I had my cannula changed – it took the poor junior
doctor an hour to insert a new one. The doctors wanted me reconnected to my
pain medications because they said I would feel a lot more comfortable. I
remember talking to the doctor and saying how awful I looked and felt and he
said that I would be surprised how much better I would look when he saw me
again on Monday after the weekend. ‘You wait’, he said. ‘You will look much
better again comparatively when I see you again on Monday.” I hung on to his
words and he was right. I was hooked up to my pain medication and over the
weekend I was allowed to start eating – firstly liquid foods/soup and by the
Monday I was not only looking much brighter but was weaned onto solid foods. I
had lost a few kilos during that hospital admission - as I was nil by mouth for
about 5 days. It was a quick, albeit undesirable way for rapid weight loss. I
certainly needed a bit of feeding up when I returned home.
By the Monday I started to be interested in life again
and was able to read books and magazines. I had a visitor that afternoon,
although had one on Saturday, but don’t remember much about it. I was mobilizing
well and my catheter had been removed. I ate what I dared of the hospital food
which was fairly inedible and waited to
be able to do my first bowel movement which would be a sign that my system was
fully rebooted and back up and running. It was one of the most amazing things
ever – I did my first ‘normal’ and solid looking bowel movement in ever –
really. The surgery had worked, and whilst I was still obviously very swollen
and sore – this was a turning point in my recovery. The next days I was more
comfortable and slept a lot and I remember waking on the Thursday morning and
thinking, this is it, I’m ready to go home. None of the doctors were in anyway
hurrying me and I was told I could stay as long as I needed, but when I make up
my mind about something, I usually stick to it, and as grateful as I was not to
be pushed into leaving, I still felt ready to go and continue my recovery at
home. I packed up all my belongings and ordered a taxi home, sincerely thanking
all the staff for all their help and care. It felt like a new chapter of my
life beginning with a re-functioning bowel.
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