Hospital Story, Day 2

     Just to prove that I can laugh at myself ..... here's me ..... before the surgery.  You can tell it's before the surgery .... I'm smiling.     :) 

OK ..... where were we?

Oh, yes ..... Friday, February 27th:

Well, after having little-to-no-sleep all night (a major theme which would run throughout my "visit") the next day started.  

The hospital has a white board in every patient's room, where the nurses sign in and out, plus they write any info they think you need on it.

My dear friend, M, had written this on my board after I came in from recovery:

Just in case you can't read it ...... it says, "This patient is loved by many!".  

It never ceased to get a comment.  

I thought it served two purposes .....  

#1.  to let the medical people know that I was not just a patient, but a person, who is loved ..... and ..... most importantly ....

#2. to give them all fair warning that I am loved and so they'd better watch their P's and Q's.

I don't think they even flinched.  Oh well.

Speaking of warnings ... don't pay attention to this next picture if you're at all squeamish, but here are the two enormous canteens  drains that protruded from my hip.

Fun, huh?

Not a whole helluva lot.

Back to my morning ....

I had not been allowed out of bed up until this point.  Which, yes .... unfortunately means .... I had to learn how to use ....... ugh ....... a bed pan.

Can I just tell you how EXTREMELY difficult this was?!  

All of your life you've been told to NEVER wet your pants ....... OK, well, maybe not ALL your life ...... ALL of your toddlerhood (cuz really, if you've been told that all of your life .... well then, there are most certainly some deeper issues there) ..... and so lying in a hospital bed with a plastic pan under your backside and trying to relax .... goes against every fiber of your being.  Well, every fiber of my being anyway.  

They finally made me try to use one some time during that first night.  I had put it off as long as possible and my next option was for them to cath me.

  

I weighed the two ugly options and went the pan route.

It took a very, very, very long time.  

Have you ever tried to relax while perched on one of those things?!

If you haven't ..... don't even try to imagine it.  Just trust me when I say ....... ugh.

But finally, success.

Which to me meant, they would stop harassing me for several more hours.

(Remember .... I'm the one who discovered, while in Kenya, that my body can hold on to fluids for at least 12 hours.  Not necessarily a good thing, in the opinion of many, but to me .... a gift.)

Anyway,  back to morning #2.

They had hooked me up to a morphine pump the evening before.  I could press a button every 10 minutes and get instant relief.  Or so goes the theory.

Pish.

I think one of the nurses may have replaced my morphine with her drinking water .... not that I'm accusing anyone of anything (cuz there's no way anything like that would EVER happen at a hospital) ...... but whatever was in that pump was pretty useless.  

They were using the morphine pump, oral meds and then another pain med put directly into an IV in my wrist.

It was fun.

Well, I suppose, had I not be in so much pain ..... it might have been fun.

After putting the nurses off for as long as I could Friday morning, they finally demanded that I use "the pan" again ..... or face the consequences.

Funny, I don't remember signing anything that said, "You are now the boss of me" when I went in.

I chose the pan again.

Still no easier than the first time.

M's husband came to visit for a bit and then the two of them got to go home.  Lucky them.

In their place came a new visitor:

This new visitor just stared at me ..... while I tried to avert my eyes.  It mocked me.  Out loud.

Yes, that could've been the massive amounts of drugs, but nevertheless ..... I was mocked.

Soon after he came in Mr. Cheery, the physical therapist, came in.  I had several visits from several PT's ..... and never the same one twice.  I'm not sure what that says about me ...... I didn't think I was all that hard to deal with but ......   oh well.

Mr. Cheery decided that it was time for me to use my new visitor and go for a "walk".  I decided that it would probably be much easier to just give in to this mad man, because then .... just maybe .... he'd leave me alone for a few hours (do you notice a pattern here?).

And so off Mr. Cheery and I went ..... me, using a walker WAY before my mother will have to use one.  This just didn't seem fair.

I also had a visitor at that time, B, who generously sat in the hall and waited for me, swearing up and down that he did NOT take any pictures or videos that will later end up on YouTube.  He'd better hope not. (Another thing I've learned over the past 14 months ...... Never Piss Off a Widow ........ yes, I know it sounds rude, but ........ I'm just sayin' ...............)

Well, I pleased Mr. Cheery so much, by walking 3 times further than he usually requires for the first post-op walk, that he said he would leave me alone for the rest of the day.  Score!

Then we returned to my room, where I tried really hard to visit with B, all the while trying very, very hard not to vomit.

Alas, the visit .... and the non-vomit .... was not to be.

Poor B.

Or maybe not ..... maybe he was looking for a chance to make a quick get-a-way.  

He got it.

So back to bed I went and here's how I pretty much spent the rest of the day:  punching a useless button and trying not to vomit.

Oh ....... but on a positive front ..... since I had managed to get out of bed for the mile long hike I no longer had to use "the pan".  Yay!

I had a couple of visitors that day but it was mostly pretty quiet.  My friend Nat came in for the night shift.  Bless her heart.

She had no idea what she was in for.

I had started coughing in the morning and kept coughing throughout the day, which seemed to be a good thing.  

As long as I was coughing they didn't make me use this new torture device:

I was supposed to breathe deeply in and out of this thing several times an hour.  That wasn't fun either, but I'd pick it over "the pan" any day of the week.

Anyway, I started coughing and continued throughout the day.

I managed to eat a bit for lunch but then the nausea started up again around 6:00 p.m. and kicked my butt for the rest of the night.

Nat and I turned everything off and tried to go to sleep around 11:00 or so, after the shift change.

My vitals were checked a couple of times.  Both times I had a low grade fever --- 100.6.

Somewhere around 3:00 a.m. I woke up to the nurse checking my pump and I told her that every time I took a deep breath, the middle of my chest hurt.  She glanced at me, said nothing, and then left.

"OK ..... so much for that",  I thought.  I decided that the coughing had made me have pain and that it must not be a big deal ..... hopefully it wasn't anything like pneumonia, which was my first thought.

The next time the vitals nurse came in (totally different nurse) she noticed that I was grimacing when I tried to take a breath.

She asked me if I was OK.  I told her what I'd told the other nurse.

She asked me if I had told the other nurse and I said yes, but that apparently she hadn't heard me or didn't think it was a big deal.

This nurse seemed to think it was a huge deal.

She stood in the doorway and called out (loudly) to my nurse and asked her if she was aware of this pain.

The first nurse came in.

Here's what happened:

Nurse #1:  "You're having chest pain?"

Me:  "No, not "chest pain", but my chest hurts here (pointed to the center of my chest) when I take a deep breath."

Nurse #1:  "Do you have pain radiating down your arms?"

Me:  "No."

Nurse #1:  "Do you have pain in your back?"

Me:  "Nope"

Nurse #1:  "Is this pain constant?"

Me:  "No, it only hurts when I take a deep breath."

Nurse #2:  "I think you should call the doctor." 

They then started whispering about respiratory infections, fever, etc. 

Me:  "No, it's not that kind of pain ..... it's just when I take a deep breath."

Nurse #1:  "I'm going to call the doctor."

Evidently that's about when the common occurrence of this began:

All Hell Broke Loose

The next thing I knew there was a young-ish doctor in my room, asking about my chest pain.

Here's how our discussion went:

Him:  "Mrs. Eggers, I understand that you think you're having chest pain."

Me:  "No, I didn't say I was having chest pain.  I said that it hurt whenever I took a deep breath."

Him:  "Now Mrs. Eggers, you have to know what kind of reaction you're going to get when you use the words "chest" and "pain" in a hospital.

Me:  "I didn't use those words.  You people are using those words.  I've said over and over that I don't think this has anything to do with my heart .... it just hurts when I take a deep breath."

Him:  "Well, now I guess I'll have to order a chest x-ray and an EKG, even though we don't seem to think it's cardiac related."

By this time he's pulled up a chair and is sitting down looking at me like I'm an idiot .... he was quite condescending.  I was getting angry.

Me:  "Look, I never asked for you to come in here.  I never said any of this .... you're all jumping to conclusions.  But here's what you've taught me .... I will never again say that there's anything wrong with me.  Even if I DO have chest pain I won't tell anyone.  I'll lie. I don't need, or want, a chest x-ray or an EKG.  I'm fine.  Just fine."

Him --- now refereed to as DB (Dirt Bag) -- "Now Mrs. Eggers, we don't want you to lie, but you need to realize that when you say you have chest pain we have to react like this."

Me:  "I NEVER said I had chest pain!"

DB:  "I've looked at your vitals and they've all been normal."

Me:  "No, they haven't.  They've told for the last two checks that I have a fever."

DB:  "Really?  I didn't read that.  What was the fever?"

Nat:  "100.6"

DB: ..... pause ....... "Well, I guess you'd call that a fever outside of the surgical world."

Me: ...... this was where I slammed into the wall ....... "LOOK!  I'm only giving you the information you're asking for.  I'm not the one who defined it as a fever .... the NURSES said it was a fever so go talk to them.  I'm not defining anything and I don't need anything else from you."

I felt as if I was screaming inside of a glass room that was sound proof.  NO ONE was hearing me .... no matter how loudly I spoke, or how often I said something.

He went on for a few more minutes while I just refused to look at him and tried very hard to not cry in front of him.

He finally stood up and said that he would send in the x-ray and EKG people.

I just said, "Whatever."

And so he did.

So ..... from about 3:00 am until around 6:00 am my room was a zoo .... on and off.

Dirt Bag came back after the tests ......  to let me know that, just as "we" thought, everything checked out as normal.

I wanted to say, "Duhhh!", but I think I just ignored him.

They finally left us alone for a few hours.

Thank God that Nat was with me, because she heard what I was trying to tell them and she also heard what they were saying.  And she validated my feelings ..... and agreed that no, I was not crazy.

She also pointed out that not one single time did anyone ....... ANYONE ...... pull out a stethoscope to listen to my lungs.  Or heck, to listen to anything.

And so ended/started Day #2/Day #3.

It's a miracle that I didn't have a stroke between the hours of 3 and 6 ..... must be that abnormally low blood pressure ...... which I'm SURE wasn't so abnormally low during that time ..... as they would have known ...... if they'd bothered to check.

As for the present ..... last night one of my drains started leaking quite a bit.  Of course it was 5:00 when I discovered this so I knew I wouldn't get ahold of anyone in the doctor's office, but I left a voice mail anyway.  And then I read over the post-op instructions and thought I'd better follow directions and call the emergency service about this.

Let me pre-face this by telling you that I only had ONE nurse during my entire stay at this hospital, who was from America.  Now ..... I don't care where a person is born ..... not one hoot, but I do care if I can't understand them, or if they can't understand me and they're dealing with a bit more than my computer ...... they're dealing with my health.

My nurses and I had a difficult time understanding each other .... most of the time.  Which was very, very frustrating.

Back to my phone call .....

The person who answered in ER was not from America and she also had a very heavy accent.  I told her about the drains, and about the low grade fever that I'd been running, but I'm still not certain that she and I ever understood what the other was saying.  She just kept saying it was all fine and to keep it dry.

Not sure how to keep a leaking drain dry, but there ya go.

I got frustrated and finally just said "fine" and hung up.

This morning my doctor's PA called at 8:30 and said I should come in.

And so I did.

The good news is that she removed the leaky drain (yay!) and replaced the other drain with a smaller one (double-yay!).

The bad news is that the remaining drain is infected ... thus the fever.

So now I am on antibiotics and have to have this drain for another 6 days.  Joy.

But at least it's down to one.  And it's one I can hide under my clothing.

Here it is:

See?  Things just keep getting better and better!

Well, sort of.