Blur

I don’t remember much about the few days following my first surgery.  I slept a lot and was in pain.  I was only allowed to have pain medicine a few times a day and for some ridiculous reason, they wouldn’t put the medication in my IV.  They insisted on giving it to me Sub-Cue, in the fatty part of my thigh.  It was an unnecessary needle stick.  Back then, I believe they thought it was bad for kids to be on morphine.  They thought it would be better if the drug weren’t directly put in a child’s veins.  Today, they happily administer pain meds to children IV.  It’s so much more benevolent this way.  Soon I wouldn’t have much sub-cutaneous fat to inject pain meds into.  I was still, NPO, nothing by mouth.

Four or five days after my surgery, my Girl Scout troupe came to visit me at the hospital.  They all looked horrified.  I welcomed their visit as I hadn’t seen much of anyone.  My parents and sister were there, and now my mom was sleeping at the hospital at night, but none of my friends had come to visit.  Some neighbors and friends of my parents would come by, but I wanted to know my friends cared about me.  About five minutes after some of the kids from my Scout troupe came for a visit, the girls became bored and hated being in my room.  I can’t really blame them, but I wish their parents would have thought about what it was like for me and had mercy.  Instead, at the insistence of many of the girls, the moms left with their kids ten minutes after arriving to take the girls to see all the newborn babies at the mother and baby unit.  Back then, you could do that.  You didn’t need a secret code and a background check to get onto the baby floor.  Babies were a lot more fun to look at then a withered up 8 year old with a tube sucking green liquid out of her stomach.  I shouldn’t have been hurt by it, but I was.

Things seemed to be healing and moving along.  The surgeon thought I was progressing well and on schedule, and after a week of not eating, he thought it was time to remove my nasogastric tube – a tube inserted during surgery through one of your nostrils and down your throat to your stomach.  The tube is hooked up to a suction device that removes bile, “bowel sweat”, and gases from your stomach so that it doesn’t get digested, irritate your bowels that are shocked from the bowel surgery, and allow them to heal and start moving again normally.  My NG tube was pulled out.  Believe me, this is one of the strangest feelings you can feel.  It’s like the reverse of sucking snot back in, but at the same time you’re feeling stuff being pulled out your nose, it feels like your stomach is attached to the end of the tube and it’s being ripped out with the tube, all through your nose.  The nurse simply removes the tape holding it nice and tight to your skin and counts to three and then pulls the whole foot or so of tubing out of your nose.  As it’s being pulled out, you can see all the gut juice stuck to the sides of the tube, and you can taste that crap in your mouth too on its way out.  Just what you wanted to taste after not eating for a week.

So I got to drink clear liquids first.  I had sprite and it went down well.  It tasted so good.  By the next day, they were allowing me to have jello and popsicles and pudding.  That night for dinner-time, I was finally allowed to eat actual food.  I ordered some kind of meat and mashed potatoes and I enjoyed every bit of it.  It was rubber, over-salted hospital grade food, but food never tasted so good to me.  I was full after just a few bites from my stomach shrinking up to the size of a grape.  It seemed just fine at that point and the doctors thought I’d probably go home the next day or so if the food digested well.  I would get to leave after a ten day hospital stay.

But the next day brought an entirely different scenario.  Very early in the morning, I began to not feel so well.  I was having a lot of pain in my bowels and things were just not right.  As the morning went one, I began to feel really nauseous.  I finally threw up, and it was a load.  It was everything I had eaten the night before.  At first, the doctors thought it might just be the food, but things were not right.  Since the professionals weren’t sure what was going on, they said I could still drink liquids.  That turned out to be a bad idea.  I drank some Squirt and within 30 minutes, I was terribly nauseous and couldn’t keep it in any longer.  It was coming up quick so I threw my head over the side of the bed and puked all over the hospital floor.  It splattered everywhere, including on my dad’s pant leg.  To this day, I cannot drink Squirt, even if they still make it, even if my life depended on it. 

That day got worse.  As I was going downhill, a girl was admitted to the hospital and brought into my room since it was double occupancy and I was the only one in it.  It would have been fine, but this kid -she was about three years old - was bawling like you wouldn’t believe.  She wouldn’t stop.  She had ran behind her dad’s car as he was backing out of the drive way and he accidentally ran over her.  She was not seriously injured and had no broken bones surprisingly.  But she had to be admitted to the hospital overnight for observation.  This would prove to be my worst night at the hospital, partially due to her.  The girl actually had tire marks on her back from the car, I’m not kidding you.  I could see them when they were examining her.  The kid was hysterical and I was in bed sick as a dog, in agony, my bowels feeling like they were going to blow up.  The nurses were paging the doctors to find out what they should do next.  Finally, my dad took me into the hallway to get some peace and quiet from that screaming kid.  I could hardly walk to the bench in the hall, as I was doubled over with pain.  That’s as far as I could make it so I laid down on the bench in the fetal position.  My dad and mom had gone to find out what the hell was going on and to try to get that screaming kid out of my room.  I was overcome again with nausea and I threw up on the bench and the floor.  A nurse walked by right after as I was lying there and she half-smiled at me.  She didn’t see the vomit all over me, the bench, and the floor.  I couldn’t even talk to tell her I had thrown up all over, because I was in so much pain.  So I just laid there in agony and waited for my parents to come back.

A few minutes later they returned and surprise, I was going to go downstairs for some tests to try to figure out what was going on.  What kind of tests I thought?  I soon would find out that a genius resident thought that even though I couldn’t keep a Squirt down, I should be able to drink and hold down some nasty and chalky barium for an x-ray study that might show what was wrong with my guts.  I was taken downstairs in a wheelchair and swallowed that disgusting, foul tasting crap.  Almost immediately, I chucked it up.  The test wasn’t going to work, in spite of their hopefulness.  Finally, finally, Dr. Lilly was going to fix it.  He had no choice but to take me back into the OR, open me up, and see what was wrong.  As much as I didn’t want a surgery, I was just thankful I soon would be unconscious, thus not in pain and I was hopeful the problem would be fixed.  I woke up several hours later but I don’t remember any of that at all.  Apparently, my bowels had twisted themselves up – it’s called post-operative herniated bowel.  Because they were all twisted up, they couldn't digest food.  Everything seemed fine, until solid food got down to the section where my small intestine was kinked up.  The food could not pass, so it went the other way, back where it came in.  Herniated bowel is an uncommon surgical complication that usually occurs when the bowels are not put back inside one’s abdominal cavity carefully enough.  I’m not implying anything, but this was a teaching hospital and we can be fairly sure that a resident put my guts back in and quite simply, he wasn’t so careful.  Oops.

Although it had felt like each minute was an hour as I moaned and agonized in pain, the approximately 48 hours that had passed from the time I started feeling sick to the time I was wheeled into the OR are much like a blur to me now.  I don’t remember exactly what it felt like and I don’t remember how I got through it all.  It’s one of those times in your life where you feel like you’re hanging on by your fingernails and you feel like you’d almost do anything to end it.