As some of you know, DMan and I have had a rotten run of luck lately, with both of us ending up in the hospital having unexpected surgery over the past couple of weeks. While none of our experiences seemed funny at the time -- oh SO not funny, I assure you -- looking back we've been able to have a few chuckles at the craziness of being held captive in the hospital. Thought I'd share, maybe give you a laugh too.
DMan's story starts with a normal work night, progresses to a gut ache so severe he heads to the ER, and really gets going with him being admitted to Cox South for a small bowel blockage and possible surgery. The first day he existed on ice chips, the second day they upped him to the liquid buffet -- aka jello and broth -- hoping the blockage would clear itself. Um no, not so fast. All that liquid and the goo he had to drink for the upper GI test came shooting out of him on day three, filling multiple puke cups that looked like small movie popcorn containers. Don't think we'll be ordering popcorn at the movies any time soon. Time for surgery.
He came through that fine. Turns out the mesh put in during a previous hernia surgery got adhered to his small intestine and caused the blockage, with no intestinal damage requiring resection. Good, best case scenario. Then he just had to deal with the twenty-three staples holding him together and all the post-surgery doodads hanging off of him. I'm talking an IV with multiple baggies flowing through, catheter, and NG (nasogastric) tube. If you've never had an NG tube, it is the experience from hell! Putting it in involves someone shoving a tube up your nose and down your throat while you try to drink water and throw up at the same time. After that, every time you swallow feels like a bottle cap is stuck in the back of your throat and won't go down. That's the nightmare for the person WITH the tube, but everyone else gets to share the nightmare by watching chunks of green slime shoot out your nose and down the tube while trying to have a normal conversation and pretending not to notice. I eventually told DMan how gross it was to watch -- big mistake, as you will find out.
DMan's story starts with a normal work night, progresses to a gut ache so severe he heads to the ER, and really gets going with him being admitted to Cox South for a small bowel blockage and possible surgery. The first day he existed on ice chips, the second day they upped him to the liquid buffet -- aka jello and broth -- hoping the blockage would clear itself. Um no, not so fast. All that liquid and the goo he had to drink for the upper GI test came shooting out of him on day three, filling multiple puke cups that looked like small movie popcorn containers. Don't think we'll be ordering popcorn at the movies any time soon. Time for surgery.
He came through that fine. Turns out the mesh put in during a previous hernia surgery got adhered to his small intestine and caused the blockage, with no intestinal damage requiring resection. Good, best case scenario. Then he just had to deal with the twenty-three staples holding him together and all the post-surgery doodads hanging off of him. I'm talking an IV with multiple baggies flowing through, catheter, and NG (nasogastric) tube. If you've never had an NG tube, it is the experience from hell! Putting it in involves someone shoving a tube up your nose and down your throat while you try to drink water and throw up at the same time. After that, every time you swallow feels like a bottle cap is stuck in the back of your throat and won't go down. That's the nightmare for the person WITH the tube, but everyone else gets to share the nightmare by watching chunks of green slime shoot out your nose and down the tube while trying to have a normal conversation and pretending not to notice. I eventually told DMan how gross it was to watch -- big mistake, as you will find out.
Dman is a trooper. The day after surgery he was determined to get up and walk as much as possible to get Barry -- that's what I call his bowels because they sound really low and gravelly like Barry White singing -- working again. So we ask Wanda, his PCA, to help get him up and ready to walk. Instead of hanging his catheter bag on the IV pole like usual, Wanda carries the bag and walks in front of us. DMan said a couple of times, "That's a little fast," which I thought was odd because we were going pretty slow. When we got back to the room, DMan exploded and even said cuss words, when the strongest language he normally uses is "dadgummit." Turns out Wanda had been pulling DMan by the penis all around the halls with the catheter bag! I felt like kicking that wench in her woohoo to let her see how he felt, but he wouldn't let me. Wanda should be grateful that he's a much nicer person than I am. We decided she must be training for the catheter rodeo and dubbed her Wrangler Wanda. Thankfully the catheter came out the next morning and Wanda didn't come back.
The NG tube was a constant source of irritation for DMan. He has a crooked nose, so there was only one nostril it would go up and it rubbed his nose raw. Plus the irritation caused drainage down his throat, which made him cough when he laid down, which hurt his incision. Night two after surgery, the nurse gave him something to calm him and help him sleep. Whatever it was, it didn't work. Poor DMan woke up in a coughing fit, did not know where he was or what was happening, had completely coughed out his NG tube, and had green slime all over his face and gown. After such a harrowing experience, the nurse let him rest for a couple hours without the tube before trying THREE TIMES to shove it back up there with no success. By this point, DMan's nose was saying "No, but hell no." That was the end of his NG tube nightmare.
I get DMan home a couple of days later. He's glad to be home, taking it slow, working his way back to some kind of normal. Then I get a gut ache. I never get a gut ache. I go to bed to sleep it off, hoping it's just a virus. A word of warning: If you wake up doubled over in pain, have to crawl to the door to holler for help, break out in a drenching sweat, and then throw your guts up in a trash can because you can't get to the toilet, it's probably not just a virus. The next day I got up, napped, showered, napped some more, then worked the evening shift with my gut still aching. By the next morning, it was apparent I wasn't getting any better, so DMan hauled me to the Urgent Care. After multiple pokings, a non-revealing chest x-ray, and iffy blood work, I was sent to another building for a CT scan. I don't know if my experience is normal or not, not having had the displeasure of a CT scan before, but CT must stand for "Cruel Torture" because that's what it was. I'm already hurting from my ribs to my pelvis and feel about to explode from what little I've eaten for the past two days, then they make me drink nearly an entire container -- the exact same puke cup DMan had been using! -- of "contrast" mixed with cranberry and grape juice, sit for an hour in a cold room in a hospital gown, drink ANOTHER puke bowl full, then the torture really began when I'm lying on the scanner bed while the lady shoots more stuff in my IV AND up my backside and tells me to "hold it in." That, my dear, is impossible. Luckily I ran so fast to the nearby bathroom when she told me I could get up that I didn't see what a mess I'd made on her scanner table when my sphincter failed me. If I hadn't felt sick before, I was definitely sick now!
Back to Urgent Care for more poking, then the diagnosis of possible ruptured appendix with small bowel blockage and the directive to get to Mercy hospital pronto for surgery. Turns out my "virus" was my appendix perforating and leaking into my gut. Even though I detest hospitals, I was tickled by this point to have surgery if it would make me feel better. And I did. When I woke up, I was feeling good, very little pain even from the incisions, and I thought "this is easy peezy." The doc even told me most appendectomies are done as outpatient surgery and patients go home the same afternoon. I wasn't so lucky.
The next morning, which just happened to be my birthday, dawned with me puking up anything I'd ever eaten or drank, including the delicious "contrast" with juice from the CT scan. There is nothing I hate more than puking, or so I thought. When I couldn't stop upchucking, guess else I got for my birthday? An NG tube of my very own! Now poor DMan had to watch the green slime flying out of MY nose while we were chatting. Thankfully no one else came to see me that day because I was miserable -- Worst Birthday Ever!
Besides the horror of being shot in the gut with Lovenox (prevents blood clots) every day and having my gown hiked up and my gut poked by every person that came in the room, there is no damn privacy in the hospital. I am a very private person when it comes to my bathroom habits, but there is no provision for that. I had to pee in the "party hat" (as DMan called it) container in the front of the toilet, then scooch back if I was lucky enough to make some magic (what I called going #2 because it felt like I would need magic to make it happen). Luckily I didn't have a roommate to hear all my grunting and groaning on the toilet and smell my deposits, but I couldn't even flush away the evidence before I had guests. I had to leave the toilet unflushed until the staff documented my "progress." It made me want to sneak down the hall and use the visitor bathroom just for the pleasure of flushing. Then the day I left I was on the toilet trying to make magic to relieve some severe gut cramping while DMan was visiting. He's a sweetie and was sitting by the outside door so he wouldn't hear me. I was wrangling my two gowns (to keep warm and hide my bootie) up and positioning myself to hit the back of the toilet and not the party hat when my IV tube pops out of the port and solution is squirting all over me.
"Um, DMan, can you call the nurse? My IV popped out."
"Can't you pinch it off like you would a hose?" he asks.
I wanted to kill him. "No, I can't pinch it off. I'm holding up my gowns with one hand and holding the tube with the other, I don't have another hand to pinch it off with. CALL THE NURSE."
Before long the nurse breezed in the bathroom, stuck my tube back in the port, and breezed back out saying it was "no big deal," but I was mortified. And magic doesn't happen when you're mortified, even magic bubbles. Somehow they finally let me out even though I couldn't fart on command and my bowels weren't gurgling like a fountain. I think they got tired of me walking circles around the nurses station and staring at them with eyes pleading to be discharged.
So now DMan and I are home, recovering together. After an extensive tour of both local hospitals and the accumulation of a few funny memories -- plus many we'd just as soon forget -- we hope we don't see another hospital for a long, long, long time!
(A YouTube video of an appendectomy if you're into that sort of thing. I couldn't watch!)
