On average I am 150 pounds. I am now 112. I am weak. Skin and bones. My stomach is so sore I can barely move. They assure me it will get better, it just would take time. I could eat whatever I wanted now but I didn’t have much of an appetite. I had a catheter in and a tube stitched into my rectum. I had a JP Drain where my incision had been. A JP drain is a grenade looking thing that was draining liquid from the incision site. Thankfully, they did the surgery laparoscopically. This involves a smaller incision which causes less pain than an actual incision and thus makes post surgery a bit easier, which I am extremely grateful for, because I feel like absolute shit. The fact that I haven’t showered in days isn’t even a concern (at least not for me, Osty may have a different opinion on the matter). Moving wasn’t an option. The doctors came in early Tuesday with three goals. 1. To get me out of bed 2. To get me to eat something 3. To drink.
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Day: April 10, 2015
Monday, March 30th, 2015 – The first night after Surgery
Tonight was different. I don’t remember much. I remember my mom mentioning to me that a close friend was there. She had said that he was going to stay with me over night and asked if that was okay. I was drunk with pain and an anesthesia hang over but said yes. I probably would have said yes to anything. It wouldn’t be until a couple of days later, when I was thinking more clearly, that I realized that this was truly the best thing that could have happened. I am not sure to this day he even realizes how huge a role he played in making that awful first night easier for not just me, but my parents. My mom needed rest. For her to be there all night, getting little to no sleep, would not have been ideal. So, my parents went back to the hotel to get a full night’s rest. I had a button in my left hand that controlled the morphine drip that dripped into my IV. It was simple. If I was in pain, I pressed the button, and I’d receive pain medicine (to a certain extent of course, I wasn’t going to overdose on pain medicine if I just kept on pressing). I couldn’t really move much. My stomach was extremely tender, but I was so heavily medicated that the pain was not the biggest thing on my mind. My mouth was super dry. That’s what I remember the most. All night I asked my friend to give me ice chips – thinking back I wonder now how many times I actually asked him, but it feels like it was every 20 minutes. If I needed water he’d get me water. Anything at all, at any time, he was up, talking to the nurses, making sure I was comfortable. We had never once planned on him making that drive to Chapel Hill. Not once. I don’t know what made him hop in his car and drive up. He had only moved up to Myrtle Beach a few weeks prior and was still kind of getting his life straightened out. But it was the best thing that could have happened. Like I said I knew I had great friends. But this was something else. I will never be able to show him how much him being there meant to me. My parents came to relieve him early the next morning. He went back to the hotel to rest for a few hours before he headed back home. Today is Tuesday. Post Surgery. Time to recover.
Monday, March 30th, 2015
Surgery was scheduled for the afternoon. The surgeon stopped by to introduce himself. I think his visit was to help put my parent’s minds more at ease than mine. Don’t get me wrong, it was important that I liked and felt comfortable with the person about to open me up. And I did. He was nice. This is his job. He does this all day every day. I was confident I was in good hands.
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Saturday, March 28th, 2015 – Sunday, March 29th, 2015
It took about two hours for things to start moving. The room was small. There was space for a bed and one chair. There was one window on the right hand side wall, but it didn’t matter how the view was, I couldn’t see from my bed. The bathroom was even smaller. So small, in fact, that I couldn’t even fit in there with the apparatus holding my fluids. The bathroom door was about 10 feet from the left side of my bed. The fluids rest in the middle of both so I would just leave the door open a hair to allow the fluids to flow through my IV as I sat on the toilet. Because it was the weekend, we were fairly certain things wouldn’t get moving until Monday but we were wrong. Several GI doctors and doctors on the surgeon’s team came in and out all day Sunday. They had reviewed my files. They had spoken to the surgeon who would be performing the operation. Based on his schedule for the following week, Monday would be the best day for him to do the surgery. Monday. Like, tomorrow Monday. It was either that or we’d have to wait until later on in the week, if not the following. I was there for surgery. There was no point in waiting. I said okay.
March 28th, 2015 – Osty and I Take a Ride in an Ambulance
Joe and Amanda got to my room at around 10 on Saturday morning. They were the two paramedics who were taking the ride with me to Chapel Hill. We weren’t sure whether or not the transfer would happen as soon as it did but I was glad that it happened sooner rather than later. Waiting around seemed to be like something of a daily occurrence and it was getting old. I was a bit afraid of having to go to the bathroom during the 2.5 hours it takes to get up to Chapel Hill. I’ll save you the suspense…I got lucky and never had to go. My mom took the elevator down to the ground level with us and we parted ways. She was following us up there. We said our goodbyes and I challenged her to a race, “first one there wins,” I said – Amanda assured me she was a fast driver, no way we’d lose. The ride wasn’t bad. More lying down like every other day, only difference was I was in a moving vehicle. I forgot my headphones which was dumb. I watched one episode of Bloodline (can I get any royalties for all the times I’ve plugged this show in this blog?) but mostly slept and talked to Joe. He was a good guy. He taught me some stuff. I was getting 100 ml of IV fluids. Joe taught me how you can manually figure out how much fluid was dripping into my IV at a given time. It’s simple really. If it’s a 1000 ml bag of fluids and I need 100ml an hour of fluid than 10 drips in a minute would be the amount I needed. I needed 125. The trip went quicker than I had thought it would. We arrived and they carted me up to my room on the 6th floor. We said our goodbyes and I was handed off to another handful of nurses.
My mom arrived about 20 minutes after us… not even close.
Flared 