Tonight will be my third night in the hospital. This isn’t that organized because writing a couple sentences makes me tired enough for an hour-long nap. I am no kidding! I am slowly getting better although there have been ups and downs. When I first woke up I just wanted to go back to sleep but the nurses kept waking up because they told me I wasn’t breathing correctly. Then they took me in a serious of elevators to the room where I am now. All I remember was how I was screaming as they pulled the hospital bed over the bumps in front of the elevators. I slept for a while and then I woke up to my friend’s parents, my sister, and my mom hanging out in my room. Although I was really tired I had a great time visiting with them. I started to feel better right out of surgery because I wasn’t toxic anymore.
That night was difficult because I had a reaction to the painkiller dilodin, which is seven times more potent than morphine. It made my tongue spasm against the top of mouth so often that I couldn’t sleep. Then I had a problem with the catheter - something you probably wondering about and didn’t want to know about at the same time. It wasn’t draining so the pressure kept building up but my nurse thought that it ws just the pain from one of the incisions, not the pain from the pressure of the urine, that was hurting me. The next day, day 2, I was no better so my nurse did an ultrasound on me and it turned out that I didn’t have any stored up urine. They decided I had bladder spasms, which is when the bladder reacts to a catheter and sends the wrong (and very painful) signals.
My expectations about surgery were not exactly as surgery turned out. It wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought it would be, especially compared to a day in the life of UC. The first day when I woke up my whole abdomen was very sore and moving at all was really painful, but I am already doing much better. What I was not prepared for was how tired I would be. Walking 100 feet makes me sleep two hours. If I try to write a text message, halfway through I get all the letters mixed up and it stops making any sense. This post took me about five hours to write, off and on.
On my life side I have a tube that drains into a bottle. The fluid is red-colored and watery and is draining from the surgery site. I have a few scars here and there and then my stoma on my right side. Things have started to empty into it, which means that my intestines are working and the surgery was a success! Now I just have to learn how to change the bag...I feel sorry for the nurse who has to do this kind of thing every day!
No comments:
Post a Comment