More Catching Up

So where am I in my story? It's the evening of July fifth, I guess. My breathing tube it out and I've got an immense dressing on the front of my chest, and my right leg is wrapped up in so many Ace bandages I look like I'm trying out for a bit part in a movie about mummies. Sitting up felt better than lying down, at least for me. I found that sitting up in the chair and leaning over the mobile shelf unit actually felt better than lying down, and the nurses seemed just as happy to let me sit up. It was hard to actually get up, but once I was up and sitting, things seemed fine.

I was living in Tube City: catheter, two chest tubes, IVs in my arms, A-line in my wrist, IVs in my neck... Given this kind of limited mobility, I could either sit up or lie down, and sitting up felt better. My wife brought me a Harry Potter book to read, and my brother brought in some magazines, but I couldn't really read any of them. I was so zoned on anesthetic or morphine that I couldn't concentrate hard enough to read; I'd just look at the words for a few minutes before going under. I remember wanting to stay awake to talk to my visitors (because I quickly learned that when one is in the ICU, visitors are golden) but I just couldn't do it.

My normal pre-op breathing volume as measured by the spirometer was just under three liters. When I first tried to use the spirometer in the ICU, I could barely manage a half a wheezing liter. Gah! Why is that? Does the body decay that rapidly in surgery? Was my chest simply too sore and swollen for me to breath effectively? Were my lungs full of junk?

The next day I could get about a liter, and the nurses got me up and made me walk about the nurse's station. That was hard. My leg hurt, my chest hurt, and I was so completely out of breath I had to pause every eight or ten feet to rest for a few seconds. What a shabby performance! Still, at least I was up and walking around, and I passed rooms and saw people who weren't even doing as well as I was.

The first meal I remember was breakfast the day after the surgery, on the Sixth. I don't remember what I had, I just remember having breakfast in the abstract. I finished the fruit cup and the cup of coffee and the apple juice, but I don't think I touched much else. I wasn't very hungry at lunch either. It was some kind of sliced beef thing served with a roll, and Jean ended up eating most of it. (I would end up losing about 25 pounds during my hospital stay, though I have to be fair to Boswell and say that the food actually was pretty good. If I didn't eat much, it was because I just flat wasn't hungry, not because the foot was unpalatable.)

The next day was better. I managed to make five laps around the nurse's station, including a side trip down the hall to look out the window at the bushes and grass outside. I was up to a liter and a half on the spirometer, and the tubes were slowly coming out. I found the process of removing the chest tubes and the neck IVs exquisitely uncomfortable, especially since it turned out the neck IVs went all the way into my heart! But they hadn't taken the catheter out yet, because they were concerned about my blood pressure and were keeping me on diruetics, and they didn't want to force me to jump out of bed every twenty minutes to pee. So I sat, watched TV, chatted with my visitors, drained into my urine bag, and drooled every time they gave me morphine.

Eventually they managed to get my blood pressure regularized and they took the catheter out, and then it was off to Telemetry, freeing up my bed in the ICU. Telemetry was pretty nice. It's not as busy as the ICU and you have more spare time. In my case I had a double room to myself and I flitted from chair to chair until I found the most comfortable spot - the commode chair, as it happened. I also stood in front of the window and looked out a lot, because even standing was more comfortable than lying down.

And then, the next morning, a nurse helped me take a shower and I changed into pajamas that my wife brought up from home, and they cut me loose. My mom picked me up and drove me home, and by about noon on the eighth I was safely in my own bed, having just seen first-hand what $95,000 worth of medical treatment looks like.