My surgery story is below.

The surgery went as planned. It took 4 hours (laparoscopic), and Dr. Smith also took out my appendix. I already had my galbladder out 6 and a half years ago.

Waking up was hard, and that first day was a bit hellish. But once the nausea subsided and the pain pump was going with synthetic morphine, I was okay.

I can't say that I was too fond of most of the nurses. I felt like a machine part in a factory, and anything I asked that was out of the ordinary for them felt like an imposition. The night nurses were preferable to the day nurses.

The day before surgery I got a picc line put in my right arm. A picc line, for those of who don't know, is like an old fashioned "cut down," where they insert a catheter that goes from the inside of your elbow to the tip of your heart. This makes it easy to give a blood transfusion quickly if necessary, and has ports where blood can be drawn and medicines can be given , as well as an IV. It was an unpleasant experience getting it, and it was terribly uncomfortable before surgery. But once I had the pain pump it didn't seem to bother me as much.

I had surgery on Thursday and opted to stay in the hospital until Sunday. Most patients want to leave after two days. There is no way I could have done that successfully.

So - Saturday they took me off my pain pump and switched me to oral Loritab elixer. If that wasn't doing the trick I could still request doses of the synthetic morphine in my picc line. Looking back I realized later that the Loritab never really did the trick.

That evening my right arm started to really hurt, and whenever there was an injection in the picc line I had a lot of pain below the incision site, which really shouldn't have been happening, since the catheter went to above my heart, and that is where the IV and medicine all was coming out. I knew this didn't make sense, but it hurt anyhow.

Let me pause to say that hospitals are run so much differently than they used to be. They are designed for efficiency. But sometimes this leaves a more human element out of your care. The IV nurse did not come see me until day 2, so I still had the pressure dressing I'd originally gotten when the picc line was inserted on day -1. This was supposed to have been removed on day 1 and was not.

No IV nurse visited me on day 3. That night I complained of my arm pain and was told they would call the IV nurse. I never saw one that night.

The next morning a male IV nurse came in and was extremely removed from everything I told him. He declared that it didn't make sense that my arm hurt below the incision site, that he was able to easily flush the ports, and essentially dismissed my complaints. After he left I broke down sobbing uncontrollably while my mother and two other nurses were in the room. The nurses seemed to react to that and said they would call Dr. Smith. (It was about 7 AM)

Dr. Smith said I could get the picc line out and he wanted me to get another IV. I asked the IV nurse if she thought that was right since I was being discharged that morning. She went out and asked and came back and said that she would leave the IV out since I'd gotten all my medicine already that morning and it was just saline. This was at 8:40 am.

Dr. Smith came at about 11:30 and was furious that I did not have an IV. He had wanted me to get as much fluids as possible before I left the hospital. So he ordered an IV back in my arm and ordered an ultrasound for my arm to check for blood clots.

The IV nurse came in and had to stick me THREE times before she could thread the IV. By then I was sobbing again. I couldn't stop crying. My mother had left to go home and trade places with my father, so no one was there with me right then. Then the tech came in to take me down to get my ultrasound. I apologized to him that I could not stop crying.

I got the ultrasound and went back up to get 3 more hours of fluid. When the discharge nurse came in she said that I did show a thrombosis (clot) in my arm but that it was superficial, and I was to go home and put my arm up and keep warm compresses on it.

Well - by the time I got home from feeling every bump in the road the arm was the least of my worries. I had lower right quadrant pain out the yazoo, and the maximum dose of Loritab did not touch it.

So we did call the doctor, who called me in something stronger.

So my parents went to the only drugstore open in Marietta on New Years Eve around 8:30 pm and got me the painkillers. Thank God that worked.