Day 2 Post Op

Mar 28, 2011

Day 2

The next day I woke up in recovery and was told that I was going to stay in recovery because there were no post-op beds available and I needed to be monitored before being released to a floor room.  Recovery is not a nice place to hang out all day.  Although, I did meet “My Cousin” Vinny in recovery.  He had his surgery after me and we both used the same surgeon.  Throughout the day I got poke and prodded countless amount of times by countless amount of people.  I went for the swallow test and failed.  There was too much swelling and I would have to wait 48 hours to try again.  That was depressing because all hopes of leaving the hospital on day 4 faded away.  Little did I know that the day was about to go from bad to worse. My labs came back that I was low in potassium and they would have to push it through the IV.  I made sure I asked each time what meds they were giving me.  The first few minutes of the potassium push was fine, but then I started to feel a burn.  I called for my nurse but she was on break and another nurse came to check on it. She told me that it was common and I would be fine.  As she is telling me this, it is getting increasingly worse to the point where it feels like my hand and wrist are on fire and I am unable to move it.  She tells me there is nothing she can do other than to stop the push.  Well, it was time to start yelling again which alternated between yelling at her to do something and screaming in pain.  It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life.  Another nurse heard the racket and came in and flushed the port which made the pain go away.  She also said that the bags weren’t piggy-backed properly and there was a way to do it without inflicting pain.  It amazed me that the level of care, knowledge, and compassion could vary so much by professionals performing the same job.  This was my second of three bad hospital staff experiences.  I don’t want to paint a bad picture of the hospital so I will say that every other person I encountered was phenomenal.  As a whole, I was extremely happy with the overall care and treatment while at the hospital.  For the rest of Day 2 I wasn’t in any pain but I did have this uneasy feeling in my stomach which only got worse as the night went on.  Thoughts of puking passed through my head but I was afraid to in fear or causing damage to my fragile new stomach.  As the night went along I kept getting the urge to swallow and when I did it felt like my stomach was being squeezed.  I finally couldn’t take it anymore and told the nurse I needed to vomit.  It was a graceful throw-up without any pain.  The shocking part was what I threw up…it looked like a bucket of blood.  The nurse freaked out and within a minute three doctors appeared out of no where.  I was scared to death.  They all took a look at the bucket of blood and determined that it was a mixture of left over blood and fluid from the surgery and the liquid barium that I drank early that day for my swallow test.  That made a lot of sense since I was restricted from the swelling.  Instantly after I threw up I felt 1000x better and felt I was on the road to recovery.

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