Er....that sucked.
I'm now home from hospital, and not a minute too soon. Overall it's been a horrible experience that I'd like to avoid ever again. For sheer curiosity value, here's what happened. First the surgery. Obviously I don't remember anything from the surgery itself, but before surgery I did attempt to tell the anaesthetist a joke to see if I could somehow struggle against the tide of opiates and manage to get the punch line out before I went under. Didn't get close.
After surgery they send you to intensive care and apparently I've either got too low or high a threshold of something, but I came out of their drug-induced stupor many hours too soon, waking up to find myself on 100% life support, intubated and unable to consciously control my limbs enough to do anything, but semi-concious and semi-alert. This really sucked. It was like all those horrible 'buried-alive' scenarios except you wake up to find a river of inert bells, lights, monitors and technicians all streaming around you in a detached, slightly nightmarial procession. But I was only able to come out for a few minutes before falling back into the sea of drugs. I regained ‘consciousness’ about once per day. Breathing was a forced, mechanical requirement, with air shoved inside and sucked out again, relentlessly. I was in this state for days and days. I could see the same other patients each time I awoke and they looked in really bad nick – completely lifeless and catatonic. All the while I’m trying to work out what state I’m in and why I’m being treated this way when clearly I can think. Tubes are everywhere but I’m not catatonic. I try to resist the lung machine and it’s just too strong so I figure I’ve got to fight my way out of this friggin thing. After about 8 days, I finally worked out how to move my hands and put my hand over my mouth. That’s when I felt the tube forcing the air and out. I hadn't understood until now. I was a machine. I tried to pull it out but I wasn’t strong enough.
I see a faceless woman in a white coat floating by and I wave to her to remove my tube. She says, “just a minute” and disappears. I lose consciousness while I’m waiting for her to reappear. When I wake up I guess it's the next day; it's been forever and there’s nobody around. Again I try to get the tube out, make a sound, figure out some way to let people know I’m in here, but nobody is there. It just felt incredibly cold and lonely. Until I fade away. There wasn’t really any physical pain I can remember, just the swimming and drowning and ebbing of consciousness twinned with a spiritually desperate screaming. I wake again, and see a woman but she has a bit of a face this time, and again I motion to the tube and again she says, “just a minute” and disappears. I try to follow her but my eyes won’t track to that part of the room or I can’t move my head or something. I’m determined not to fade away this time. I don’t sense any malice in the situation, just clinical uncaring distance. And I know I need to convince her I’m in here. So I start to look around the room to try to get my bearings but it’s all so foreign and white and sterile I just can’t think anything.
Finally, I see her again and I motion to my tube again but she doesn’t seem to notice or care and I’m feeling very desperate now as I start to fade away again, really struggling not to lose myself but being pulled under all the same, all the while feeling the machine force the air in and out of my lungs, but I’m fading again and there’s nothing I can do.
And then, just like that, it’s out. The woman is next to me now, talking to me, trying to reassure me, and she even has water for me. That was such an overwhelming moment of complete gratitude as it is hard to describe. Euphoria. I’m so thirsty I drink about 2 or 3 cups of water and ask where I am - I tell her I'm not a vegetable! but I don’t really know what she says, I’m really just enjoying inhaling these massive breaths of fresh air. And then I’m out again.
This time when I wake up I need help, I’m going to vomit and I just scream out as loud as I can “HELP” and somebody new comes with something and I can vomit. And vomit. It’s pretty painful but in a nice way. Somehow, despite the toil and intestinal wrench of involuntary vomiting, despite the inability to breathe, despite the ripping feeling inside, it's nice to interact with the world, to know I'm alive, to feel the pain of life. This is when I ask how many days I’ve been in here. The woman says I’ve only been here a day. I don’t believe her. It felt like it'd been days. She shows me a clock and says for me to just keep an eye on this. Over the next several lapses in consciousness I work out I’ve been coming and going in about 20-30 minute cycles. They keep giving me more morphine, but I won’t stay out.
Then they sent me to the High Dependency Unit where I continued a similar cycle for another 24 hours. At this stage I can count about 14 tubes coming in and out of my body in different places. The five biggest ones are drains to allow the excess internal bleeding an outlet. This is also where I notice the unexpected set of 18 metal staples holding together my groin and thigh. Apparently they had to use the femoral artery with the heart-lung machine this time. Thanks for telling me.
The nurse comes over and asks me me to try to get out of bed, to stand, two days after surgery, which sounds about as likely as me singing a fucking show tune at that moment in time. But I try. After much finagling of tubes and wires and beds, a couple of nervous starts and a complete loss of dignity, to my immense surprise my legs don’t completely fall out from under me when I stand on them. I’m shaking and dripping and weak, but I’m standing. It’s not a great feeling, it just is. The only feeling I really have is a desire to get all these god-damned tubes out of me.
The next morning I’m still not dead, so they can take the tubes out of me now. I remember this from last time being the most painful part of the entire show, and ask why they have so many more in this time. Surgeon’s choice. Obviously. To be fair, open-heart surgery never gets properly painful. I’d say it’s below a broken bone or a torn ACL, but above a sprained ankle. As it turns out, pulling the tubes wasn’t as bad this time. Maybe it was because I didn’t watch and did Jedi mind tricks on myself, chanting and whatnot. Or maybe I was a big weakling during my previous open-heart surgery.
They decide to try a new drug on me, but they have to let some of the morphine wear out first, so I clear up mentally for about an hour or something and have some conversations with people, but I can’t remember them now. I remember having felt good in them, even fun. I also saw the incision for the first time. Bigger this time, with about 30 metal staples holding my chest together.
But the new drug is insidious. You’re awake for lots more of it…and outwardly you ‘feel fine’. You don’t ease in and out of consciousness - you walk around and have conversations. But with some people this new baby has mind-altering side effects, and guess who is one of the ‘lucky’ ones. So the next 4 days become a blur between reality and fiction, dream and nightmare, unable to tell the difference between the two. I just didnt understand what was real and what wasn't. It was so bad, I actually don't want to describe it, don't want to archive it, don't want to ever remember it. Just imagine if you really didn't know what is real, if you couldn't tell if you were awake or asleep. Ever. I started to suspect something in the drug as early as last Friday and starting taking less then the nurse portioned me, secretly hiding part of my dosage.
Finally on Sunday morning I confessed to the doctor that I was having trouble with reality, was concerned I was losing my mind, to which he simply replies, “ah, yeah, ok, one of the drugs you’re on sometimes gets that as a side effect.” Great. Thanks for telling me. You’ve got to be FRIGGIN KIDDING me! I couldn’t believe it and still feel sick just thinking about it. I felt like a Timothy Leary experiment, or one of those soldiers that 'helped' test the effects of atomic warfare.
So Monday I informed the hospital, my family, everybody who would listen, I would be checking out that day. Politely, with tact and diplomacy, I’m leaving. Anniken and mom thought I was bluffing. So I pack to walk home. What do you need before I go. Anything to sign? Because I’m leaving today. I will not be a guinea pig. I will walk home if needed. I am leaving.
I’m now at home. Anniken, Freya, my mom and sister Kathy are here and it’s great and I feel like the recovery has finally begun. But, whew. That sucked.
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