It'll be a week tomorrow. I feel like I'm drowning. Mostly just trying to get through thursday, when I have a follow up appointment with the surgeon and if it goes well she'll remove my drains and I'll be cleared to take a shower again. At this point it wouldn't matter if I could take a shower, I don't feel like I want one. I'm eating a couple times a day because I know I need to, but I have no appetite at all.
I slept close to twenty hours on Saturday and Sunday. I suspect that was to make up for the rest I didn't get at the hospital. Today I was awake for several hours and got caught up on the random stuff I missed on the internets in the last week.
I don't know what happens tomorrow. I certainly don't have the attention span to read a book. A day of TV? Probably. I can't tell if I'd do better with more pain meds right now or less - feeling dopey is making me depressed, taking less drugs and feeling more pain is making me depressed. Looking in the mirror is making me depressed. See a theme here? Thursday. Thursday things should be better.
Physically, I look about like I expected to. I've got three incisions across my abdomen - two small ones and one larger one where they pulled out my ovaries and fallopian tubes. The incisions themselves don't particularly hurt. I feel like I'm having the worst menstrual cramps of my life.
My chest is a disaster zone. There are two incisions where my breasts used to be, with dressings that the surgeon will remove/replace on Thursday. There are also incisions in my armpits, with drains coming out of them. If I let them hang free they drop to my waist. They look like silicone hand grenades. We dump the contents out of them twice a day and track what's there. When you dump them you give them a final squeeze before sealing them up again - the vacuum pulls the fluid out of the body. My left side is producing more stuff than my right, I had a bigger bruise and more bleeding out on that side and it's definitely healing slower (that's also the side where the tumor was and where they did the lymph node dissection). The drains are pinned to the inside of my shirt so they don't swing around so much and I don't accidentally roll over onto them when I sleep. Because of the bruising I'm bound up with ace bandages to keep the pressure on and try to move more fluid out. None of this is comfortable. I feel bruised and sharp burning pain where the flesh has been removed, and then the skin that is left is chafed by the ace wrap. I spend about 20 minutes every morning without the wrap and doing deep breathing exercises.
I'll rewind and tell you about the hospital roommates from hell. The first one was very sweet and I feel awful for her. From her bearing and behavior I would have guessed she's a teenager, maybe 15 or 17 at most. She's 37. She didn't tell me any of this, I just picked it up from lying three feet from her for 24 hours and being unable to not hear what was happening (I was actually wearing earplugs the entire time). She's been in the hospital for months with sickle cell anemia. The first seven or eight years she had it, she went entirely untreated because her mother refused to believe she was sick. Shockingly, she turned to self medication and has been in and out of rehab and some level of prostitution to support the habit for some number of years. Her primary meds were for pain, anxiety, and methadone. I should not know all of this about her. Why was she so annoying? She's developed a habit of making constant whimpering/sobbing noises to comfort herself. She doesn't know she's doing it, but she does it whenever she's not actively talking with someone or asleep. It was loud enough that I could hear her clearly even though I was doped to the gills and wearing high quality earplugs. Apparently I was her 7th or 8th roommate. The second night I was there, a single opened up and they moved her into it so she wouldn't bug other patients so much. There was a social worker with her for a couple of hours that afternoon, and I think they are trying to get her appropriate psych support. I hope it works out, because she really was sweet and sharing that room felt like being locked up with a puppy somebody comes in every five minutes to kick around some more.
They moved her out around 9pm Wednesday night. I had about three hours of blissful peace (and no earplugs). Around midnight they moved the second woman in. She came in via the ER for extreme anemia, she's also diabetic and has hep C (again stuff I shouldn't know, but can't help when it's happening right in front of me). LOUD talker, with a warbly Marge Simpson voice. She turned the TV on before she even sat on the bed (despite the "quiet time" signs on the walls, which the nurses wouldn't enforce), complained about all the stinky homeless people in the ER. She was constantly on the phone, and she wouldn't turn the TV down when she talked to people, just talked over it. She also kept cranking the heat up to 76 in the room, even though I was roasting. My nurse would turn it down for me, and leave blanket for her, but she'd throw the blankets off and turn the heat back up. They set her up for release at 9am on Friday morning. She didn't actually leave until noon because she wanted to take a shower, which ended up taking a full 90 minutes. She literally flooded our room and the nurses station, and then she demanded lunch and wouldn't leave until it was brought in to her. I can't imagine why, the food was shit and she complained about it the rest of the time. I got up and turned off her TV as soon as she was around the corner to leave, and one of the nurses thanked me for it. I'm still pissed about it. I shouldn't have to be a bigger asshole to get basic rules (quiet time) and reasonable temperature in my room.
They just did a huge layoff and are massively understaffed. The individual nurses were all very professional and were clearly trying hard, but so overwhelmed that the asshole patients ended up ruling the ward and things that should be delivered on time just weren't - every morning I'd get a lecture about how important pain management was, but then they could never actually deliver my meds on time - they were consistently 30 to 90 minutes late. And then I'd get a lecture about how I needed to get up and move more, but I couldn't move because I was in so much pain.
Was I spoiled by Stanford? Probably. It'll be interesting to see where UCSF falls when I have my next surgery in March. For now, Alta Bates is a massive failure as far as I'm concerned.
I slept close to twenty hours on Saturday and Sunday. I suspect that was to make up for the rest I didn't get at the hospital. Today I was awake for several hours and got caught up on the random stuff I missed on the internets in the last week.
I don't know what happens tomorrow. I certainly don't have the attention span to read a book. A day of TV? Probably. I can't tell if I'd do better with more pain meds right now or less - feeling dopey is making me depressed, taking less drugs and feeling more pain is making me depressed. Looking in the mirror is making me depressed. See a theme here? Thursday. Thursday things should be better.
Physically, I look about like I expected to. I've got three incisions across my abdomen - two small ones and one larger one where they pulled out my ovaries and fallopian tubes. The incisions themselves don't particularly hurt. I feel like I'm having the worst menstrual cramps of my life.
My chest is a disaster zone. There are two incisions where my breasts used to be, with dressings that the surgeon will remove/replace on Thursday. There are also incisions in my armpits, with drains coming out of them. If I let them hang free they drop to my waist. They look like silicone hand grenades. We dump the contents out of them twice a day and track what's there. When you dump them you give them a final squeeze before sealing them up again - the vacuum pulls the fluid out of the body. My left side is producing more stuff than my right, I had a bigger bruise and more bleeding out on that side and it's definitely healing slower (that's also the side where the tumor was and where they did the lymph node dissection). The drains are pinned to the inside of my shirt so they don't swing around so much and I don't accidentally roll over onto them when I sleep. Because of the bruising I'm bound up with ace bandages to keep the pressure on and try to move more fluid out. None of this is comfortable. I feel bruised and sharp burning pain where the flesh has been removed, and then the skin that is left is chafed by the ace wrap. I spend about 20 minutes every morning without the wrap and doing deep breathing exercises.
I'll rewind and tell you about the hospital roommates from hell. The first one was very sweet and I feel awful for her. From her bearing and behavior I would have guessed she's a teenager, maybe 15 or 17 at most. She's 37. She didn't tell me any of this, I just picked it up from lying three feet from her for 24 hours and being unable to not hear what was happening (I was actually wearing earplugs the entire time). She's been in the hospital for months with sickle cell anemia. The first seven or eight years she had it, she went entirely untreated because her mother refused to believe she was sick. Shockingly, she turned to self medication and has been in and out of rehab and some level of prostitution to support the habit for some number of years. Her primary meds were for pain, anxiety, and methadone. I should not know all of this about her. Why was she so annoying? She's developed a habit of making constant whimpering/sobbing noises to comfort herself. She doesn't know she's doing it, but she does it whenever she's not actively talking with someone or asleep. It was loud enough that I could hear her clearly even though I was doped to the gills and wearing high quality earplugs. Apparently I was her 7th or 8th roommate. The second night I was there, a single opened up and they moved her into it so she wouldn't bug other patients so much. There was a social worker with her for a couple of hours that afternoon, and I think they are trying to get her appropriate psych support. I hope it works out, because she really was sweet and sharing that room felt like being locked up with a puppy somebody comes in every five minutes to kick around some more.
They moved her out around 9pm Wednesday night. I had about three hours of blissful peace (and no earplugs). Around midnight they moved the second woman in. She came in via the ER for extreme anemia, she's also diabetic and has hep C (again stuff I shouldn't know, but can't help when it's happening right in front of me). LOUD talker, with a warbly Marge Simpson voice. She turned the TV on before she even sat on the bed (despite the "quiet time" signs on the walls, which the nurses wouldn't enforce), complained about all the stinky homeless people in the ER. She was constantly on the phone, and she wouldn't turn the TV down when she talked to people, just talked over it. She also kept cranking the heat up to 76 in the room, even though I was roasting. My nurse would turn it down for me, and leave blanket for her, but she'd throw the blankets off and turn the heat back up. They set her up for release at 9am on Friday morning. She didn't actually leave until noon because she wanted to take a shower, which ended up taking a full 90 minutes. She literally flooded our room and the nurses station, and then she demanded lunch and wouldn't leave until it was brought in to her. I can't imagine why, the food was shit and she complained about it the rest of the time. I got up and turned off her TV as soon as she was around the corner to leave, and one of the nurses thanked me for it. I'm still pissed about it. I shouldn't have to be a bigger asshole to get basic rules (quiet time) and reasonable temperature in my room.
They just did a huge layoff and are massively understaffed. The individual nurses were all very professional and were clearly trying hard, but so overwhelmed that the asshole patients ended up ruling the ward and things that should be delivered on time just weren't - every morning I'd get a lecture about how important pain management was, but then they could never actually deliver my meds on time - they were consistently 30 to 90 minutes late. And then I'd get a lecture about how I needed to get up and move more, but I couldn't move because I was in so much pain.
Was I spoiled by Stanford? Probably. It'll be interesting to see where UCSF falls when I have my next surgery in March. For now, Alta Bates is a massive failure as far as I'm concerned.
:( Thinking of you, wishing you the strength to keep on going.
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