It's a Learning Experience
Sep. 28th, 2011 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
perzephone
I think I'm going to tell my doc that I have buyer's remorse & would like my uterus back.
I had noooo clue about how much trouble the whole post-op process was going to be. Everyone I talked to made it seem easy. Everything I read on-line made it seem easy.
Until, you know, stuff happened to me that was like, "Wtf?!?!" All that stuff so far has been 'completely normal', but no one seems to mention it.
Firstly, I've never been intubated for surgery before. As I was doped up, the anaesthesiologist explained some of the procedure to me, which also involved strapping my arms down and forcing this thing into my throat. She said I might have a sore throat, some bronchial irritation and a mild cough. Which were all true and manageable - except Saturday night I started coughing up blood. It, and the cough itself, was pretty much gone by Monday, but I'm still hoarse. I sound like Jo Lupo from Eureka (fyi, Erica Cerra, it's not a good sound for you - if you're not dying of throat cancer, please stop forcing it).
Consensus from doctor: perfectly normal
Secondly, the gas cramps from the CO2. That thankfully seems to be over, and in my case, ended relatively quickly - possibly because I have more body mass to absorb CO2 and filter it out slowly instead of getting hit with this huge dose that has nowhere to go fast. Sunday it had concentrated pretty much all in my stomach, which now has a few more stretch marks because of how distended it was. What made that even worse was Sunday, my intestines just seemed to stop working completely and also bloated up with gas from inside. I could feel one particular bubble being passed from side to side as I rolled in misery back & forth on the bed, or shambled from bed to couch & back again, but it wasn't leaving my body. I walked a rut in the floor, I rocked until I was nauseous, I used a resistance band on my upper body, I tried side-twists and yoga. Apparently, anaesthesia does funky stuff to your intestines, and can take awhile to leave your body completely, and your intestines may have waves of forgetfulness. Combined with the pressure from the body-cavity gas, I was thinking about colicky horses and wishing someone would shoot me.
Monday, went to doctor due to the gas pains, which hadn't stopped. He told me to get Gas-X & switched my antibiotic. At that point, all my lap sites looked good, I had minimal bruising, and I had 'bowel sounds' but I was still bloated as fuck and not hungry at all.
Consensus: Perfectly normal.
Tuesday, all the gas issues reversed themselves, painfully and violently. My intestines went into overdrive, and I think at one point I converted to Catholicism. Tuesday night, I'm sitting here & all of a sudden, the entire front of my nightgown was soaked. WTH? It looked like I'd just dumped an entire glass of water onto my belly. Go into the bathroom & whatever it is leaking down my legs to find that my belly-button has turned into Niagara Falls of some yellowish fluid. Ewwwwwww, fuck, ewwwwww. I clean up a little, stick some gauze in my bellybutton, jerry-rig it with a bunch of little band-aids & tried not to move again. Rob was out running errands, but had already left Wal-Greens, so I wait for him to get home, eat his dinner, and then send him back out for more gauze & medical tape because the mini-band-aid brigade isn't holding the gauze in place. I have a belly binder that I used as a stop-gap measure, but it started making my shoulders hurt from residual gas, yay. Rob gets back, I repack my belly-button and try to calm Rob the fuck down.
When I got up this morning, I had soaked another gauze pad, so I called the doctor's office again. He examined my extremely sore belly-button, let me know this was also a perfectly normal process, the fluid is lymph and I can expect the same from my vagina any day now. Oh the joy. It's apparently better to have a disgusting thing like this happen on its own than a disgusting and dangerous thing like an abscess.
The band-aids bug the dog & she keeps poking me in the belly with her nose, which is not cool. I also seem to be sleeping a lot on her spot on the couch, so this afternoon she stuck one of her bones up under my head. I thought she was just being attentive and snuffling my ears, but she had ulterior motives.
The good thing is that the gas pain is almost completely gone, my intestines seem to be working, and I was hungry for the first time since the surgery today, which meant a variety of light, nutritious health-conscious snacks have been swept aside for doughnuts and pizza.
I had noooo clue about how much trouble the whole post-op process was going to be. Everyone I talked to made it seem easy. Everything I read on-line made it seem easy.
Until, you know, stuff happened to me that was like, "Wtf?!?!" All that stuff so far has been 'completely normal', but no one seems to mention it.
Firstly, I've never been intubated for surgery before. As I was doped up, the anaesthesiologist explained some of the procedure to me, which also involved strapping my arms down and forcing this thing into my throat. She said I might have a sore throat, some bronchial irritation and a mild cough. Which were all true and manageable - except Saturday night I started coughing up blood. It, and the cough itself, was pretty much gone by Monday, but I'm still hoarse. I sound like Jo Lupo from Eureka (fyi, Erica Cerra, it's not a good sound for you - if you're not dying of throat cancer, please stop forcing it).
Consensus from doctor: perfectly normal
Secondly, the gas cramps from the CO2. That thankfully seems to be over, and in my case, ended relatively quickly - possibly because I have more body mass to absorb CO2 and filter it out slowly instead of getting hit with this huge dose that has nowhere to go fast. Sunday it had concentrated pretty much all in my stomach, which now has a few more stretch marks because of how distended it was. What made that even worse was Sunday, my intestines just seemed to stop working completely and also bloated up with gas from inside. I could feel one particular bubble being passed from side to side as I rolled in misery back & forth on the bed, or shambled from bed to couch & back again, but it wasn't leaving my body. I walked a rut in the floor, I rocked until I was nauseous, I used a resistance band on my upper body, I tried side-twists and yoga. Apparently, anaesthesia does funky stuff to your intestines, and can take awhile to leave your body completely, and your intestines may have waves of forgetfulness. Combined with the pressure from the body-cavity gas, I was thinking about colicky horses and wishing someone would shoot me.
Monday, went to doctor due to the gas pains, which hadn't stopped. He told me to get Gas-X & switched my antibiotic. At that point, all my lap sites looked good, I had minimal bruising, and I had 'bowel sounds' but I was still bloated as fuck and not hungry at all.
Consensus: Perfectly normal.
Tuesday, all the gas issues reversed themselves, painfully and violently. My intestines went into overdrive, and I think at one point I converted to Catholicism. Tuesday night, I'm sitting here & all of a sudden, the entire front of my nightgown was soaked. WTH? It looked like I'd just dumped an entire glass of water onto my belly. Go into the bathroom & whatever it is leaking down my legs to find that my belly-button has turned into Niagara Falls of some yellowish fluid. Ewwwwwww, fuck, ewwwwww. I clean up a little, stick some gauze in my bellybutton, jerry-rig it with a bunch of little band-aids & tried not to move again. Rob was out running errands, but had already left Wal-Greens, so I wait for him to get home, eat his dinner, and then send him back out for more gauze & medical tape because the mini-band-aid brigade isn't holding the gauze in place. I have a belly binder that I used as a stop-gap measure, but it started making my shoulders hurt from residual gas, yay. Rob gets back, I repack my belly-button and try to calm Rob the fuck down.
When I got up this morning, I had soaked another gauze pad, so I called the doctor's office again. He examined my extremely sore belly-button, let me know this was also a perfectly normal process, the fluid is lymph and I can expect the same from my vagina any day now. Oh the joy. It's apparently better to have a disgusting thing like this happen on its own than a disgusting and dangerous thing like an abscess.
The band-aids bug the dog & she keeps poking me in the belly with her nose, which is not cool. I also seem to be sleeping a lot on her spot on the couch, so this afternoon she stuck one of her bones up under my head. I thought she was just being attentive and snuffling my ears, but she had ulterior motives.
The good thing is that the gas pain is almost completely gone, my intestines seem to be working, and I was hungry for the first time since the surgery today, which meant a variety of light, nutritious health-conscious snacks have been swept aside for doughnuts and pizza.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-29 03:07 am (UTC)It does sound like you've made some real progress though; especially with feeling hungry and having your intestines reboot. Mine shut down pretty seriously after every major surgery; and the last few times I've needed laxatives to get the system rebooted after a few days. Anaesthetic can take *months* to leave the system properly. Even after the physical affects are gone, it has a depressive affect, and can leave people unexpectedly teary, emotional, depressed or simply flatter and more fatigued than usual. Thankfully, it doesn't last. :/ And for most people, it only seems to last about two weeks to a month. They don't prepare you for that either.
*offers hugs*
Every Body's Different
Date: 2011-09-29 05:45 pm (UTC)I'm a wait-and-see kind of person when it comes to ER visits. Our ERs can kill people faster than whatever ails them.
The pain factor I wish they'd prepare people for. I sometimes think hospitals have this policy of 'we just won't tell them, and they'll suck it up and deal with it, because...we suck at our jobs of preparing them for what to expect.'
This is one of those double-edged swords for medicine. I think if a nurse told me to expect excruciating, body-twisting, mind-numbing pain, I might have brushed it off (because, yanno, I'm Superwoman). Some people, though, would have already been crying for pain killers. It's hard to say who's going to end up just thinking themselves into absolute misery and who's not.
Instead of imagining pain that wasn't there, I felt horrendous pain & was like, "uh, fuck it, I'm taking a Demerol or three, and if you wake me up before they wear off I will kill you".