Waking up to a New World

My parents came to the hospital in the morning.  I was glad they were back.  I ended up falling asleep for a few hours after I helped the night shift nurse.  I was woken up in the morning to get an enema.  Wonderful, another one.  I was getting used to them, sadly.  There is nothing about the feeling one should ever get used to.  The day nurse informed me that my surgery was delayed, wonder of all wonders.  When are surgeons ever running on time?  I’d just have to worry and wonder and agonize a bit longer. 

Finally things were moving along and I was taken down to the surgery area.  While I was waiting to be taken into the operating room, an anesthesiologist blew up a latex glove like a balloon, tied it off, and drew a face on it.  I thought it was cool, but it didn’t really make me feel any better.  A surgical nurse took my stuffed animal and wrapped in in a plastic bag so that I could have it next to me, so it wouldn’t get any blood or other nasty stuff on it during my surgery.  Who knows if they really kept it there with me while I was under anesthesia?  It was time for me to go back to the operating room.  I don’t remember my parents saying good luck, good bye, we love you to me, but I know they did.  I just don’t remember it.  I think I was so anxious that I don’t remember. 

I was wheeled back on the gurney by the medical staff.  In the OR, which I had never seen, there were tons of weird machines and people dressed like there was a chemical spill clean-up going on.  The room was freezing!  Unless you’ve been in an OR before, there is nothing more bone chilling and hair raising then wheeling into that room.  They keep in unbelievably cold so the equipment is happy and doesn’t overheat.  The anesthesiologist got his drug mask ready.  He told me he’d put it over my face and I’d fall asleep quickly and not feel a thing.  The mask didn’t bother me, but the smell of the gas anesthesia was terrible.  It smelled like a mix of plastic and a brand new vinyl gym mat.  To this day, when I smell vinyl, especially gym mats or other industrial strength vinyl, I instantly think of the OR.  I didn’t want to breathe the gas in because it smelled so bad.  But I also didn’t want to not fall asleep and risk still being awake and cut open.  Of course the surgeon would never do that, but I was eight and I was petrified of not actually being asleep and them starting to hack away while still awake and aware.  The surgical nurse was talking to me as I began breathing in the gas.  She was talking to me about relaxing and going to the beach.  About 20 seconds after beginning to breathe the stuff in, her voice started to sound really weird and really low and in slow motion.  I was losing consciousness but I’ll never forget how strange she sounded for just a few seconds before I was knocked out.  It was pretty wild.

The next thing I knew, it was about eight hours later, and I was feeling someone push on stomach and mess around with a dressing on my belly.  A few seconds later, I became aware of my pain.  I felt like I had been run over by a truck and the skin of my stomach felt like it had been torn by a pack of wolves.  Deep within the innards of my guts, they ached and throbbed with the worst pain I had had in my life up to that point.  I heard the nurse talking to my mom and dad and she was showing them the newest addition to my body, my ileostomy.  During my surgery, my large intestine was completely removed.  Your rectum, the large cavernous area that holds your stool until you’re ready to get rid of it, is part of your colon.  If the doctor was to leave my rectum, I would still get colon cancer in it, so that had to go too.  How do you live without a rectum might you be thinking?  In the late 70’s a few really smart surgeons realized that if you took the end of the small intestine, the part that attaches to the large intestine, removed the large bowel and then looped the end of small intestine back onto itself, creating a “J” shape with the small bowel, this would create a “double-wide” section of small bowel that could act as a receptacle for crap – a new rectum.  The small bowel is sewn to itself to create the J-pouch rectum and then a hole is made in the bottom of that section and sewn to the patient’s anus.  Viola!  You now have a synthetic rectum that will never work as well as the real deal.  But, it’s better than dying of colon cancer.  That newly made small bowel rectum is very delicate and susceptible to infection.  If your poop is not diverted temporarily (usually about two months) so that it doesn’t go through your new crap catcher, the new rectum will become infected from all the poop.  So, how do they divert your stool from touching your beautiful new rectum?  They take a section of your small intestine half way down the length of it, cut a slit in it, and put it out through a hole they make in your abdominal wall.  This is called an ileostomy.  The small bowel now comes through your abdominal wall to the outside of your body on the side of your tummy area.  Everything you eat will go through your small intestine and now drain through the opening and into a bag that is attached to the stoma – the opening where your small bowel comes out of you abdominal wall.  Quite literally, your poop drains into a shit bag.  The bag has to be emptied every few hours and the part that attaches the bag to your skin around your stoma has to be replaced every few days.  It’s a lot of pampering and grooming of the shit bag and a lot of care to keep it clean, functioning, and happy.

So the nurse was showing my cool crap bag to my parents and I was writhing in pain.  I finally was able to speak after a minute or so and I said “I hurt.”  The nurse realized I was awake and called to get someone else to bring me some pain medicine.  I got it pretty quickly and this is when I realized how wonderful morphine is.  I was only eight, but I was certain that was the most pleasant-feeling thing anyone could ever give you.  I didn’t care about what happened to me for a little bit, and I didn’t notice the pain either.  My parents talked to me once I was feeling better from the drugs, but I don’t remember what they said to me.  They didn’t stay long.  The medical staff told them they couldn’t stay in the post-surgical intensive care area, but I wouldn’t be there long anyway.

After they left, I was high as a kite and not able to fall asleep just yet so I was just lying there listening to the world around me and enjoying my brief trip before the pain came back.  I am great at eves-dropping.  I’ve always enjoyed it and can’t help but hear what’s going on around me and be curious about what I’m seeing and hearing.  There was a boy about my age next to me who had also just had surgery.  The nurses taking care of him were talking to each other about how he had been climbing a tree at a park.  His parents weren’t watching him and he climbed very, very high.  He fell out of the tree, and sustained broken bones and some internal injuries from the fall.  He was delirious after his surgery, something people commonly do when they’ve been through a trauma injury, and he was pulling out tubes and IV’s attached to his body.  The nurses kept trying to calm him down, but he wasn’t with reality and they had to knock him out so he wouldn’t keep ripping things out.  I remember feeling happy I wasn’t doing that.  Oh how I’d get in trouble if I acted like that.  I remember thinking that kid must have been really crazy and really a bad kid.  Who climbs a tree that high anyway?  I didn’t realize then that some people really lose their minds when they are really sick in the hospital.  Not everyone can keep it together.  It doesn’t mean they are bad or crazy.  I had no idea that I would have a breaking point eventually.  I had no idea what I was in store for.  Things were going to get worse for me before they were going to get better.  But I didn’t know that.