5:29 p.m. - 2006-09-16
Asteroids, Pt. 3
OK. I've certainly had enough about my ass, and I'm sure you have, too. So let me wrap up the recap of my anal-tastic adventure so I can resume whining about other things.
I think the last thing I told you about was Post-Op. After the surgery, that's where I was wheeled to begin the first stage of recovery. I was there longer than expected -- they had only anticipated me being there for 45 min. to an hour, but I was there close to three hours, I think. But I needed it. Though I didn't have to regain consciousness from general anesthesia, as did some of the other invalids I saw in there, I was utterly wiped out and still freaked from the whole experience. The first thing I begged them to do was to listen to the baby's heartbeat. I could vaguely sense her presence, but I was so numb that I wasn't sure. They pulled out a doppler and listened, and her heartbeat was strong and steady. I let out a huge, audible sigh of relief. A nurse would come by every 30 minutes or so to put an ice pack on parts of my lower body -- it was only after I could sense "cold" and "wet," as well as wiggle my toes and flex my knees, that I was allowed to leave that room, and it took a while. Meanwhile, I inadvertently learned all about the "floppy colon" of the woman recovering from a colonoscopy next to me.
Eventually, I was taken to another part of Post-Op, where Joe could join me. At this point, I was feeling pretty good. I was sipping on Coke and eating graham crackers, and while my toes were still tingly, I couldn't feel anything in my pelvic or uh, rectal, region, so things were kind of nice. And stupidly, I figured they'd stay that way.
A short time later, I started feeling what I thought were contractions. I've been sensing some mild ones on and off over the past couple of months, but these were different: strong (even through the anesthesia), frequent and low in my pelvis. They were getting kind of bad: I actually had to practice some of my labor breathing techniques to get through them. In my panaroid way of thinking, I envisioned having the baby that night, only through a dreaded c-section, since I wouldn't be able to push. I'm sure that pananoia helped things. I told Joe to get a nurse, and one came in to see me. Her first suggestion was that I needed to pee and that my bladder was spasming. She put a bedpan under me but I couldn't manage to pee, despite my best effort. She still maintained that's what it was, but just in case, paged Anesthesia and OB, just to check. An OB came by and thought it might be the same thing -- after all, at that point, I'd had about 3 bags of IV fluids, so it made sense. But to get it out of me would mean... catheterization -- another scary and painful-sounding procedure that I hadn't anticipated on encountering when I woke up that morning. Luckily, I was still so numb, I didn't feel a thing, and Nurse Bladder removed almost a liter and a half of pee from me while I tried to relax and not think about the fact that some tube was going up my urethra to drain me. But that was it, and it worked -- no more spasms or contractions after that.
I continued to sip on Coke and relax, and after about an hour, decided I could try to get up and pee in the bathroom myself, like a big girl. If I wasn't able to, they were going to make me come back later that night to be catheterized again, and that activity just wasn't fitting into my evening plans of lying on the sofa and passing out in a drug-induced haze. A nurse wheeled me into the restroom, and praise be, I peed! It was such a victory!
We went back to my recovery room and they told me I could get dressed and ready to be discharged. I did, but by the time the nurse came back to read me my discharge instructions, the last bit of anesthesia wore off -- FAST. I started fading out, and losing my balance, because the pain in my ass was so unbelievably intense. Joe and the nurses noticed, and they quickly got me back into bed and had me swallow a couple of Percosets. This pain was awful -- akin to what I had been feeling Sunday night, when I sobbed trying to get down the stairs at home. It took about 30 minutes for some of the pain to dull, and then I decided we just had to get out of there and get home.
Since Tuesday night, it's been a slow and extremely painful recovery. I wasn't wild about taking any Percoset -- mostly because I knew it passes through the placenta, and I didn't want Pumpkin to be sedated, but also because I have a history of not tolerating prescription painkillers well -- and I most definitely didn't want to be vomiting uncontrollably on top of everything else I was going through. But since that night, I've taken almost the whole bottle of what was prescribed to me. The pain has been that unbearable -- and I have a pretty high threshhold for pain. For several days, I would obsessively watch the clock, counting down the hours and minutes until I could take more pills -- most of the time, the pain would come back with a vengeance after only two hours, and I would desperately have to find ways to occupy my time until I could have more medicine.
By today, I'm starting to feel more human again. I'm still in quite a bit of pain, but at least I can walk a little and I don't need as much medicine. I was so desperate to get out of the house for a bit that Joe's taking me for a burrito and to the pet food store were such high points of my day. I even washed my hair and put on makeup! But my bathroom still looks like the medicine cabinet of a geriatric patient: sitz bath apparatus, bottle of stool softener, container of prescription "Proctofoam" (guess where that's applied). I'm getting better but I'm not all the way there yet.
It was an awful experience, but I'm so grateful that the doctor was as sympathetic, kind and proactive as she was. She wasn't even supposed to be on call the day I saw her, much less perform surgery, but she really went out of her way to help me get some relief. I've never thanked a doctor so profusely before, but on Friday, I sent flowers to her office, along with a card that read "Thank you for saving my ass."
