A tiny odyssey, 1
Nov. 16th, 2021 05:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jkatkina(BIG OL CW for medical stuff: surgery, pain, tubes, just... all of it)
The most intereresting discrete nugget of fact I learned after my surgery was this:
Muscles, when cut, seize up.
Not for a few minutes, or even hours. Days.
I learned this not from the hospital nurses, who were the people attending me as my pain spiked and my enitre left torso seized so hard I struggled to breathe, but from a friend of mine that TL was panic-messaging while this happened. She used to be an EMT, and is an respiratory therapist now, and she's a dear friend who knows my history.
"yeah the muscles are angry and so they will get tight and go in to spasm
that is worst in the first 48-72 hours
her heart did this when she was a baby and it was freshly operated on too
it turns in to a little asshole bag of meat that won't stretch to take any blood and the blood won't pump because the heart won't fill
and she survived that first night after surgery which is always the most touch and go
and she'll survive this too"
And I did.
The upshot right now is that recovery is turning out to be harder than I thought, and harder than I was told it would be. I'm holding tight to the fact that everybody in the hospital is inevtably overworked and burned out after two years of pandemic, so as not to get too angry about the things I wasn't told that I should have been, and the things that were missed. I'm suffering complications. Nothing life-threatening, but up until recently, extraordinarily painful.
But this is a saga, and my stamina is still low, so we're going to take it in stages.
Another bit of (more fun) surgical trivia: they have you really thoroughly sterilize your body all over, including a shower the night before and the morning of, about a million antiseptic wipes, and this VERY BRIGHT BLUE goo they swab up your nose and then bombard with UV light. It's the most thorough nose-picking anyone else will ever give you, to the point of being like "so... hi... uh..." levels of awkward as five minutes later the surgical nurse is still swabbing blue crap up your left nostril. Funny. Effective, though, for a few days! Noses are nasty.
Pre-surgery was the most cheerful, optimistic, busy part of the experience. We arrived at like 9:30am and had two hours till surgery officially kicked off (exactly two weeks ago today!), which was mostly being asked health background questions and being prepped with IVs and such.
Here's where I'll pause to say two things that I have discovered to be true:
Case in point: tubes.
After surgery, I think I had five discrete tubes in me. One of these was in while I was conscious, one while I was going under, and three while I was down. (There was a sixth, but being intubated starts and ends while you're under, so I'm not counting it.) I actually had the least trouble with the urinary catheter: I mean, there's already a hole there. It felt weird, but fine? Once it was out it was out. The oxygen tube was only nominally in me, with those two little prongs up my nose. I hated it largely because it meant I was doing badly, and it kept giving me nosebleeds. The other tubes were:
Friends, I was warned ahead of time that they "might" offer me an epidural, and I recall going "dear god I hope they don't". Then when I got there, guess what?! "we're going to set you up with an epidural for the surgery and a day or two afterwards, any questions?"
I snivelled. Tubes, my friends -- tubes. I have always had a fear of needles. Learning the urinary catheter didn't bug me narrowed it down a bit from "things sticking into me", though. I have a terror of new holes being punched in my body. And an epidural goes straight into your spine. Something about that makes me want to puke.
(It's a bit incredible, though: the amount of not thinking about it I managed to do while actually having said tubes set in my body was prodigious. It was terrifying before, and after, and every time a tube got took out there was a rush of horror and relief, but when something is in the midst of happening to you, you find a way, you know? You normalize horror. It's easier, even, when the horror is with good reason, and in pursuit of healing, but that doesn't make it not horrifying.)
Anyways, actually going in for surgery. They didn't actually do the epidural until I was half-sedated; I barely remember it going in. They had one IV line in me at that point and were pumping me full of the good calm drugs, and they laid me forward on one of those neck-massage contraptions, with the donut for your face and the places to prop your arms up -- felt really funny and incongruous in the operating room. They jabbed me with four or five small local anaesthetics (which I learned that people giving birth don't get to have before their epidurals, WHUFF), and then threaded it in. The tube for an epidural is about the width of thin spaghetti, and it stayed with me for (spoiler!) four of the five days I was in hospital.
The nurses and doctors swirled around me at that point, a flurry of motion and industriousness that I found very soothing. Everyone knew their job and was doing it; no one was scared or nervous aside from me. I felt like I was in good hands, like this was routine.
From there, I don't remember anything.
More later, that's all the stamina I've got today.
The most intereresting discrete nugget of fact I learned after my surgery was this:
Muscles, when cut, seize up.
Not for a few minutes, or even hours. Days.
I learned this not from the hospital nurses, who were the people attending me as my pain spiked and my enitre left torso seized so hard I struggled to breathe, but from a friend of mine that TL was panic-messaging while this happened. She used to be an EMT, and is an respiratory therapist now, and she's a dear friend who knows my history.
"yeah the muscles are angry and so they will get tight and go in to spasm
that is worst in the first 48-72 hours
her heart did this when she was a baby and it was freshly operated on too
it turns in to a little asshole bag of meat that won't stretch to take any blood and the blood won't pump because the heart won't fill
and she survived that first night after surgery which is always the most touch and go
and she'll survive this too"
And I did.
The upshot right now is that recovery is turning out to be harder than I thought, and harder than I was told it would be. I'm holding tight to the fact that everybody in the hospital is inevtably overworked and burned out after two years of pandemic, so as not to get too angry about the things I wasn't told that I should have been, and the things that were missed. I'm suffering complications. Nothing life-threatening, but up until recently, extraordinarily painful.
But this is a saga, and my stamina is still low, so we're going to take it in stages.
Another bit of (more fun) surgical trivia: they have you really thoroughly sterilize your body all over, including a shower the night before and the morning of, about a million antiseptic wipes, and this VERY BRIGHT BLUE goo they swab up your nose and then bombard with UV light. It's the most thorough nose-picking anyone else will ever give you, to the point of being like "so... hi... uh..." levels of awkward as five minutes later the surgical nurse is still swabbing blue crap up your left nostril. Funny. Effective, though, for a few days! Noses are nasty.
Pre-surgery was the most cheerful, optimistic, busy part of the experience. We arrived at like 9:30am and had two hours till surgery officially kicked off (exactly two weeks ago today!), which was mostly being asked health background questions and being prepped with IVs and such.
Here's where I'll pause to say two things that I have discovered to be true:
- I have huge, massive respect for modern medicine and its processes.
- Some of the things modern medicine does with your body during those processes are subjectively horrific.
Case in point: tubes.
After surgery, I think I had five discrete tubes in me. One of these was in while I was conscious, one while I was going under, and three while I was down. (There was a sixth, but being intubated starts and ends while you're under, so I'm not counting it.) I actually had the least trouble with the urinary catheter: I mean, there's already a hole there. It felt weird, but fine? Once it was out it was out. The oxygen tube was only nominally in me, with those two little prongs up my nose. I hated it largely because it meant I was doing badly, and it kept giving me nosebleeds. The other tubes were:
- Two IV lines
- One wound drainage tube
- One epidural
Friends, I was warned ahead of time that they "might" offer me an epidural, and I recall going "dear god I hope they don't". Then when I got there, guess what?! "we're going to set you up with an epidural for the surgery and a day or two afterwards, any questions?"
I snivelled. Tubes, my friends -- tubes. I have always had a fear of needles. Learning the urinary catheter didn't bug me narrowed it down a bit from "things sticking into me", though. I have a terror of new holes being punched in my body. And an epidural goes straight into your spine. Something about that makes me want to puke.
(It's a bit incredible, though: the amount of not thinking about it I managed to do while actually having said tubes set in my body was prodigious. It was terrifying before, and after, and every time a tube got took out there was a rush of horror and relief, but when something is in the midst of happening to you, you find a way, you know? You normalize horror. It's easier, even, when the horror is with good reason, and in pursuit of healing, but that doesn't make it not horrifying.)
Anyways, actually going in for surgery. They didn't actually do the epidural until I was half-sedated; I barely remember it going in. They had one IV line in me at that point and were pumping me full of the good calm drugs, and they laid me forward on one of those neck-massage contraptions, with the donut for your face and the places to prop your arms up -- felt really funny and incongruous in the operating room. They jabbed me with four or five small local anaesthetics (which I learned that people giving birth don't get to have before their epidurals, WHUFF), and then threaded it in. The tube for an epidural is about the width of thin spaghetti, and it stayed with me for (spoiler!) four of the five days I was in hospital.
The nurses and doctors swirled around me at that point, a flurry of motion and industriousness that I found very soothing. Everyone knew their job and was doing it; no one was scared or nervous aside from me. I felt like I was in good hands, like this was routine.
From there, I don't remember anything.
More later, that's all the stamina I've got today.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-17 03:19 pm (UTC)Keep recovering. I'm sorry that your experience has borne out the maxim that it always takes longer than they say it will.