The Other Side

It's 2:51 am and I've just finished plucking my eyebrows. The things you do to distract yourself from pain.

Now I'm here typing, because I can't stand any more.

I had the liver resection surgery. It was a clusterfuck. My asthma did not behave, my lung partially collapsed and my body tried hard to never breathe again after anesthesia. It's been very painful...I continue to find opiates largely ineffective and doses were limited due to the 'bad reaction to anesthesia'. 

If I'd known how painful and how little anyone would care about the pain, I'm not sure I would have done it.

I had an incompetent resident, who forgot to BE a doctor and instead became upset and increasingly unprofessional in both technique and behavior. That genius trashed my hand and caused me to injure my abdominal wall in a near fall.

Other residents...I don't know quite how to describe it...kind of like they lost any reverence for what they do. I found them disrespectful, not to me per se, more to the heart and soul of medicine.  Like, are you here to be a cool 'bro or serve the greater good? A small herd of them showed up every day. There was a lot of ego posturing at the foot of my bed. It was weird and juvenile. They needed more supervision.

And yet other residents were fine. Unfortunately, I didn't get them very often.

Group think tried to ignore the asthma and tell me I had sleep apnea. Even though my O2 would drop to 80 during the day while I was awake. I had to fight like hell to get the asthma taken care of. I don't even know why. It's not rocket science.

As I became more with it, I demanded more meds and got pulmo involved...too late though to really help. However, pulmo and I were on the same page. I wasn't crazy, but after days of being left to fight for every breath, I was starting to think I was.

I haven't eaten for 7 days. I can't eat. I try and my body very clearly says NO. I feed a lot of people my Jello. lol Two bites and, "Here, you eat it. I'm done."  

But I'm hungry. I spend a lot of time noticing all the random food that pops up around me. I've watched every recipe that has come across my Facebook feed with an intensity normally only seen in dogs. 

I'm up most nights due to the pain. I just stare at the ceiling, breathe around the pain as best I can, and try to let the drone of the TV lull me to sleep, but it's a long slow process. Sometimes I don't have the patience for it.

At the moment, I've realized the nurse didn't remove the stitches for my arterial line (what is that? A Pic? A central line? I'm not sure of the term). Mostly the nurses were fantastic. One even gave me a big (and gentle!) hug and then came to say hi when she was on the floor but assigned elsewhere.

The reality was, I was in so much pain and struggling so hard to breathe, I was not a high maintenance patient. I chased sleep constantly, hoping to sleep my way through the worst of it and save up some energy to deal with the sleep apnea cult of bullshit.