It was like a light switch. I was out, and then I wasn’t. I awoke in the recovery roomw ith far less of that groggy feeling that I had experienced from other surgeries. In fact, I felt like I’d had a good sleep and, if it wasn’t for the pain meds, I probably would have felt pretty good, or pretty bad, depending on whether my tolerance for pain was high enough to subdue the experience of having my throat cut.
One of the first things I discovered was a plastic bulb on the left side of my chest that contained a certain amount of dark red liquid. This was the endpoint of a drain that was placed in my incision. This was one of the first surprised I had coming out of surgery. Nobody told me about the drain. For the next 24 hours a nurse would remove the bulb and empty it for me whenever it looked a bit too full.
The second thing I discovered was pain in my penis. That was something else they didn’t mention to me before the surgery. I had been catheterized. As a poker player, I think of it as the surgical equivalent of being “durrred”. I suppose, if I had thought about it long enough, I would have realized that the dragon would probably need some draining during five hours on the table, but at the time it came as a complete surprise to me. I would rate the experience as far less romantic than it sounds.
My dominant emotion was a deep and profound relief. I had expected not to wake up again. Even now, writing about it, I feel a sense of relief returning. I had another day in which to see my wife, to pet the my cat, to sip a little Jameson. Okay, so it’s 9:00AM and I am taking a break from work to write this so no Jameson this early in the day, but later…
I was and remain very glad not to have died.
I was anxious to see my wife and she was allowed to see me once the nurses had checked me out and determined that I was doing fine for someone who had just had his throat cut. I don’t remember much from that first hour or so. I drifted in and out of sleep. I wasn’t groggy, but I was sleepy.
Once I was fully awake and in my hospital room, where I would remain for another twenty hours or so, I became aware of some other things. One was the IV drip. I had an IV drip, which I didn’t mind so much. Another was the oxygen tube to my nose. I found that very annoying and removed it whenever the nurses left the room. My breathing was fine. I didn’t need a tube irritating my nose.
The most noticeable post-op inconvenience were the compression wraps on my legs. These are bags that inflate and deflate, forcing the blood to pump around so that patients who are not especially mobile don’t develop blood clots. This was another part of the surgical recovery process that nobody had mentioned to me and it was a very annoying one. Sure, it was fine for a couple of hours, but having those bags squeezing your legs for ten or fifteen hours gets old.
Another post-op surprise had to do with the IV drip. Naturally I am aware that what goes in must come out, but you’d be amazed at how quickly that constant feed of liquid needs to be expressed. Until I realized I could take the bags off my legs and move about on my own, as long as I dragged the IV stand with me, I was only able to pee standing up next to the bed with those bags and their tubes constricting my movements, into a measured decanter. What went into that decanter was recorded by the nurses and nursing assistants whenever they emptied the decanter. Not only does it have to come out, but they were checking how much came out to make sure the right amount left.
The nurses were there every half hour when I first got into the room, then they cut back to every hour, but they checked my vitals frequently and continued to do so through the night. I forget the schedule and at which point they stretched it out to every two hours. They were right there with me, though, and I learned all their names as we went through the 24 hour shift.
They are angels. I think of them with nothing but affection. Even when they were waking me out of the few fitful minutes of sleep I could snatch with the bags and the peeing and the tubes, they were angels and I was and am grateful to them for their attention and care. You can’t pay anyone enough to empty my piss bottle and note down how much was in there. You can’t pay anyone enough to put up with unhappy sick and hurt people. I was a very good patient, by the way. Normally, when sick or hurt, I just want to be left alone. I’m like a cat that way. Mrs DBK1 knows this and leaves me entirely to my own devices when I am sick. I’m a bad patient. This one day, this one time, I was gentle and cooperative with everyone, and told Heather, the nurse’s assistant who woke me to take my vitals, to stop apologizing when she started and that it was all right. You have time to think when you are in a hospital and it is late at night and sleeping is difficult. I thought about what a crummy job it must be to deal with scared, suffering patients and how kind one had to be to do it. They certainly aren’t compensated enough for it. For once in my life, I was a gentle patient.
Mrs DBK1 had said she’d stay there in the room with me, but I sent her home because I wanted her to rest if she could. She’d been there with me the whole way and she needed her rest as much as I did. She’s my rock. I didn’t want to put any more strain on her than she’d already taken. When the nurses woke me in the middle of the night, they didn’t have to wake her too.
Now, a word about sleeping in the hospital. My father, who is the world’s worst patient, has reached the age where his repertoire of jokes has shrunk to a handful that are repeated whenever the appropriate situation arises, so that they are heard endlessly. When you mention hospitals, he always says something like, “Did I ever tell you” (most of his jokes start off with “Did I ever tell you?”, to which the answer, if he bothered to wait for an answer, would be “Yes”) “that when I was in the hospital they woke my up to give me a sleeping pill?” He then pauses for the laughs that never come, but that’s another story.
On the white board in my room, someone had written the goals for my stay. One of them was “rest”. Rest and sleep are two different animals as defined in hospitals. Do not expect to sleep when you are in the hospital. Expect to lie in a bed and, if television bores you and you didn’t bring reading material or something to entertain yourself, expect to be bored. To quote Billy Pilgrim, “So it goes.”
This is getting very long, so I’ll wrap it up quickly.
The surgeon removed the drain the next morning, which meant another surprise. The drain entered my throat at the end of the incision on my right side. When he started to pull the tube out, I felt the tug at the left side of the four inch long incision. I felt the tube slide the entire length of the incision. I hadn’t realized it was that long.
Another surprise, which I had discovered earlier, was that the left side of my chest was numb from the center all the way to my left shoulder and from the incision along the base of my neck to about two inches above my nipple. There was simply no surface nerve sensation. My Doctor Todd told me that they had to move a lot of stuff around when they were removing my thyroid gland, but that he and Dr Mengele has checked very carefully and that they hadn’t severed any nerves, so he expected the nerves were shocked and would recover over the ensuing months. I’ve had some sensation return, but not much, so I don’t know if this is permanent or not. I can live with it.
My stay was 23 hours because, if you stay 24 hours, a different set of rules and definitions kick in for the insurance company. I was able to leave after 23 hours and felt fine. There was a lot of swelling at the point of incision, but that would go down over a period of weeks. Mrs DBK1 was back in the morning and together we returned home where I would spend a week watching the idiot box and petting the cat.
Next up: I’m Cancer Boy