Out and yet not

I cannot begin to tell you how happy I am to be out of the hospital.  On the one hand, I’m very grateful for the care I received, but on the other hand, it started to feel more and more like a prison, especially after the surgery.

The surgery itself went well, or so I am told.  I don’t remember a thing about it.  And yes, there was just one surgery, not two, as originally planned.  Monday morning I’m half starved with diarrhea getting prepped to go, and the surgeon decided to have another MRI scan.  Apparently, he had a second look at the first image and thought the stone might have passed through me over the weekend.  So I had a second MRI and kept starving in case it showed the stone was still there.

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While I waited for the results, I couldn’t help but notice something humorous.  I’ve been having different nurses rotate through each day in taking care of me, but I noticed that today, which is Halloween, one of my nurses is named Chucky!  You can’t make this stuff up!  I had to take a picture because I knew that otherwise no one would believe me.

By evening, the MRI results came back negative, which meant I was then rushed the second surgery on the following day.  Seeing as I how I had just been starved through diarrhea to prep me for a surgery that was not going to happen, I wanted to wait a day to give my body a chance to recover.  But the surgeon refused to wait.  He wanted in the very next day.  I had just a small bowl of broth that night and then not allowed anything as part of my surgery prep.

Personally, I’m glad I don’t remember anything about the procedure itself.  I remember being placed on the surgery table surrounded by several individuals who each then began prepping individual parts of the body for the procedure.  The anesthesiologist really did his job well, because I lost consciousness while they were prepping me and did not regain it until sometime after I had been placed in the outpatient area.

As I awoke, I noticed a feeling of cleanliness in my abdomen, a really good feeling from that part of my body that I had not felt in many years.  Then the anesthesia wore off completely, and I felt pain from the incisions.  The doctor had made four small incisions just large enough to insert his tools and remove the gallbladder without cutting me wide open.  And they hurt like the dickens.

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The staff didn’t know what to do with me being in so much pain that they just put me to bed to let me sleep it off.  But there were two problems with that approach.  First, as I would discover later, getting up and moving around as much as possible after the surgery helps keep the area from getting stiff.  And was I ever super stiff the next morning!  Second, I was already malnourished not having eaten anything since the night before, and that was just a small bowl of broth, the only thing I had to eat that entire day.  How anyone can expect the body to recover without proper nutrition is beyond me.  But hey, I never went to med school, so what do I know?

I soon learned that wasn’t to be my only challenge.  The incisions in my abdomen made it painful for me to move my diaphragm, so in order to breathe without pain, I had to focus on using my chest for each breath.  The result was a very sleepless night.  I could close me eyes and try to rest, but even two shots of morphine (oh, do I love morphine!) Wasn’t enough to take all the pain away.  I did manage to snooze some, but I was never really out.

The doctor who came to follow up with me the next morning became very angry when he learned about my condition.  I was supposed to have been moving around after surgery not to mention fed.  If that were the extent of my problems, I would have been a much happier man, not least of which because I would have been discharged that day.

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But such was not to be.  I found myself with severe breathing problems.  Simply standing up out of a chair or taking a few steps would leave me out of breath as though I had just run a mile.  I know I have exercised-induced asthma for years, but this was something else entirely.  And the doctor treating me had no answers.  By later that evening, there still weren’t any.  While the doctor and nurses assembled to discuss how to proceed, my dinner was sat in front of me out of reach across from the bed where I was confined.  Here I was hungry after my ordeal waiting on the staff to figure things out.

Eventually the doctor came in with no answers and began interrogating me.  She seemed to think my difficulty breathing was related to COVID vaccines.  I had been tested twice for COVID while in the hospital, and neither test came out positive, so what would that have to do with any of this?  Hungered, I became more irritable as the doctor’s dead-end conversation with me continued.  At length, she suggested I take a Xanax, which only irritated me even more.

After the doctor left, I had to admit to myself I really was anxious.  It was all understandable.  I just wanted to know what was happening to me and no one had answers.  Plus I was hungry.  So my first step in calming down was to eat my dinner, which one of the nurses was kind enough to warm back up for me.  Then I played some relaxing music on my phone, meditated for a while, and then did some writing in my journal.  A nurse came in to take my vitals and administer the Xanax, but I stared her down and intimidated her into keeping that away from me.  My drug-free approach was sufficient for me to calm me down.

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The next day I began one test after another, and in the end the results were conclusive.  I have deep vein thrombosis (DVT) from a blood clot in my left leg.  At least a portion of that blood clot broke away and traveled to my lungs, covering both of them with a pulmonary embolism (PE).  Apparently pancreatitis wasn’t enough for me.  My theory is that the stress of the events before, during, and after surgery dislodged the blood clot in my leg to travel up to my lungs.  The doctor of course takes a different view, one that absolves the hospital of any wrongdoing.

Whatever the mechanism, the treatment plan is the same.  I’ll be on blood thinners for 3-6 months for the PE, which totally freaks me out considering I could die from a simple cut or a knock to the head.  I also need more movement, since spending so much time sitting in front of screens promoted the DVT to begin with.  The idea is that over time with thinned blood and sufficient movement the clots will dissolve.

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Treatment for the pancreatitis is different.  All I was told is to eat smaller meals and avoid greasy food.  That’s not a lot to go on, so I’ll be doing my own research to get more specifics.  But it’s not like they ever gave me much to go on.  Here’s another laugh.  The morning of my last day in the hospital I finally got a menu.  All my meals had been chosen for me previously.  Only now when I am about to leave do I actually get to pick my meals.  I selected some nice herb-crusted chicken and vegetables for lunch.  Why I didn’t get to pick any of my other meals during my stay I’m not sure.

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One thing is definitely for sure.  As I followed the nurse out of the hospital and breathed clean air outside the building, I felt an immense freedom.  But now the longer road of recovery can begin, and I started by driving myself home.