#71. Night and day - October 2012

The next day turned out to be much more difficult.  The day started strangely; I was surprised at 6:30 a.m. to see a strange man with a clipboard moving to the head of my bed.  Strange because he was followed by a large parade of young men (there was one woman) who completely encircled the bed.  They were all staring at me earnestly.  I stared back at them.  As the resident introduced himself and the other people, I did remember him as someone I had met before the surgery.  I don’t think he was the man with the marker, but someone I had met at an earlier appointment. 

He asked me a couple of questions about how I was doing and asked to see my stomach.  So I lifted up my gown and everyone stared at my scars.   They were all covered in bandages, with blood covering the scars, but he pointed out some things about the scars to the people gathered round, and said that everything was looking great.  Then the parade moved on to the next group of people. That was a bit strange, I thought to myself.

I was feeling very uncomfortable, my stomach was very sore, and my back was sore.  The nurse told me I didn’t need the pain pump anymore, and that I was being started on oral Tylenol and some type of morphine pill for pain.  They had inserted a catheter while I was anaesthetized, and since they had observed for around a day that my urine output was good, they took the catheter out (although they still measured my urine in the bathroom).  Having the catheter taken out did not hurt at all.  Periodically through the day I was feeling nauseous, but they kept giving me gravol in my IV.

Through the course of the day, I got up to go to the bathroom.  It was quite a rigamarole with an IV pole, and finding my slippers while trying not to bend over and use my abdominal muscles.  I walked a bit down the hallway.  I felt steady enough on my feet.

 I had quite a few visitors, which were a great distraction.  I seemed to surprise everyone.  They would walk in the room looking worried and anxious, like they expected to see me looking horrible and sick, and I was looking pretty normal either dozing or reading a book. At least they were polite enough to say they were surprised at how normal I looked…maybe I really did look frightful.  That’s how nice my friends are!    I got some lovely flowers and some more reading material.

The time came though when all the visitors had left, and my husband went home, and I was in the hospital alone feeling very lousy indeed.  It was not a good night, I had a hard time sleeping, a hard time finding a comfortable position.  My abdomen was always feeling sore, with very sharp  pains when I tried to turn in bed, or sit up, or reach for anything.  I thought it was almost morning, and I asked the nurse what time it was when she came in to take my blood pressure.  And when I found out it was only 3 a.m.,  I felt pretty weepy.  So that was a low point.