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| Free at last, free at last: thank God Almighty, free at last. A parting photo of my bed. |
I'm not the kind of guy to hang around
hospitals. Chances are pretty good that if you find yourself checked
into a hospital, I won't be visiting you unless you owe me money.
Then I will be there in a nano second, arriving with your check book
in hand. I don't want to be in the hospital, be around a hospital nor
drive by a hospital. If I find a photo of a hospital with a red
circle with a line through it, it will appear immediately below this
paragraph. NO HOSPITALS! Get it?
It's not that I personally have had a
bad hospital experience. During the last half-dozen years of my
father's life, while I was in high school and until I was out of
college, he spent a lot of time in hospitals. He had a bad ticker was
scheduled for his third open-heart surgery when a heart attack took
him in his early 50s. There were significant periods during those
years that my mother and I spent a lot of our time in hospitals. But,
that in no way scarred me. It was more than 40 years ago.
In fact, until last week, I had clocked
exactly one night in a hospital in my 66-plus years. I'm fortunate
that I've never been hospital-class sick. I've had fewer than 20
stitches in my life and never a broken bone. My knee surgery
(Read about it here), roughly
a year ago, was the first procedure for which I was put under. That
one night I did spend in the hospital was for a concussion caused by
falling off a seesaw backwards on my head in the second grade. Yes,
at one time I did my own stunts. The result is the man you see before
you today.
So, basically my brush with a hospital
last week sent me into uncharted waters. Here's the scoop....
If you've ever experienced the joy of
my company at a meal, you know I am always the last one to finish.
This is true whether it was just you and I, or a 500-person banquet.
As everyone else ordered coffee after desert, I was still working on
the main course. Few were the meals that I didn't launch into a
coughing fit of varied severity. The medical term for my affliction
is Zenker's Diverticulum. I have no clue who Zenker is; but if I ever
run across him (or her), I'm going to kick his ass.
In layman's terms: I had a swallowing disorder caused by some little flap in my esophagus not operating
properly. It's caused by acid reflux, which I didn't even know I had.
Apparently the sneaky little bastard comes out at night to reek havoc
with the esophagus, leaving scar tissue behind. Who knew?
Growing somewhat worse over the past
couple of years, I decided to bring it up to Doc Budelmann, my
primary care doctor, during my last visit in September. That got the
train rolling. First stop: an upper GI. Because of my travel
schedule, I didn't see Doc Sellner, the ear, nose and throat surgeon,
until late October. Then more traveling, the holidays and blah, blah,
blah, meant the surgery not being scheduled until the beginning of
this month.
I kept my impending surgery pretty much
on the down low. Some of the Wednesday Night Irregulars were aware of
it, primarily because I needed a lift to and from the hospital. I
told my Autotrader editor only because I didn't want an assignment
with a deadline during my three-day recovery springing up. And, I
told my friend Amy in Florida, who holds the much-sought-after, esteemed role of
executor of my will. My Sunday beer-drinking pal Big Jon (and our
bartender) also knew because I had to present some reason for
drinking mainly water the day before the surgery. No small feat of
will, it being Super Bowl Sunday and all.
I did not inform my sister's family,
most of which is in New Mexico more than 1,500 miles away. They were
not pleased when I finally fessed up after arriving home from the
ordeal. My reasoning was, what would they do but worry, which they
(particularly my sister) would have done like they were trying to
medal in it. It would have meant someone – probably me – would
have had to keep them up to date on my condition and so on and so
forth, the thought of which was exhausting.
I didn't want visitors. Nothing I hate
more than entertaining people from a bed with my ass hanging out. I
didn't want colorful “get well” helium balloons tied to my bed. I didn't
want flowers or cards decorating my room. All I wanted was for the
whole damn thing to be over. My phone and Kindle were fully charged,
and I had downloaded several episodes of a TV series I wanted to
watch from Netflix. I was good to go.
My buddy Jeff drew the short straw,
serving as my ambulance driver and the repository for my personal
belongings during the surgery. He picked me up at my house on Monday
morning around 9:00 and hung out at the hospital until after 3:00.
Nurses ushered me into the prep room around 10:15 and then into the
O.R. around 11:30.
Doc Sellner is a relatively young guy
with a great bedside manner. I liked him immediately at our first
meeting. That he's a big Steelers fan doesn't hurt either. He advised
me earlier that morning that the surgery would take between 20
minutes and three hours. The person making my cable-installation
appointment provided a tighter window. The huge swing in time was
based on whether he would be able to perform the procedure by going
down my throat or through it. Down: quick. Through: long. As it
turned out, it required about 30 minutes because of the amount of
scar tissue. But, it was down rather than through.
As with my knee surgery, in the
recovery room I transitioned from sleep to wake in a heartbeat. The
second I opened my eyes, I was totally coherent. Because I spent more
than three hours in the recovery room waiting for a bed to open, I
discovered many patients don't wake up knowing where they are or what
is going on. It's like an anvil dropped on their head as they were
taking their morning walk. A younger lady in the bed next to me was
so out of it she kept trying to throw herself off the bed. The
recovery-room nurse I shared with her couldn't do anything else, but
hold her down and try to calm her for about 10 minutes. At one point,
I thought I was going to have to get up and help.
As the hours ticked by in the recovery
room, I began stressing. I hadn't been to the bathroom in six or
seven hours. Mother Nature wasn't just calling; she was screaming
like her ass was on fire. I was also stressed over the fact that my
buddy Jeff had to still hang around with my bag full of belongings in
his care. He hadn't signed on for all-day duty. As my anxiety grew my
blood pressure began to escalate. My anesthesiologist happened to
walk by, glanced at my blood pressure reading and immediately ordered
some sort of meds to calm it down.
Finally, around 3:45, I was wheeled out
of recovery. I had been in there so long that when one of the other
recovery-room nurses was passing around a birthday card for the staff
to sign for a co-worker's birthday, I piped up that I thought I had
been there long enough to qualify. That got a smile, but I'm not
confident she was amused.
Next stop: I.C.U. Yep, I.C.U. Although
the operation hardly qualified as major and I had come out the other
end with flying colors, there was a small chance of things going
sideways, suddenly affecting my ability to breathe. Doc Sellner was
adamant that I needed the sort of one-on-one care you only get in
I.C.U. I had a big, bright corner room with several windows, a sink,
a toilet and a comfy recliner. I was living large! It was like being
on vacation without the sunshine and beer...and food.
I wasn't allowed so much as a sip of
water until Tuesday morning. My nurse that day was an older,
experienced lady. My night nurse both nights and my daytime nurse on
Tuesday and Wednesday morning were both, young, cute and easy to make
laugh. They soon discovered I was a low-maintenance ward. Because it
was I.C.U., I had to be attached to a heart monitor and some sort of
monitor to track my oxygen intake. I also had a blood-pressure cuff
that automatically took my pressure every hour during the day and
every two hours at night. I also had wraps hooked to an air pump
massaging my calves to prevent blood clots. The nurses would
personally check on me every 90 minutes or so. When I was awake, that
often meant they'd take a temperature reading, as well as an
unscheduled blood-pressure reading. They never failed to apologize
for not being able to do more for me. The truth is, I was as healthy
as they. Other then emptying my urinal, there wasn't anything I
needed or wanted that I could have. I could get out of bed, but that
entailed a nurse unhooking and re-hooking all manner of gadgets.
Doc Sellner ordered a morphine-based
pain med, if I required it. I didn't, but I asked for it around 9:30
Monday night in the hopes it would make me groggy to help me sleep.
It didn't do anything. I mean anything. It didn't take the edge off
my throat discomfort, make me groggy nor provide a buzz. It was as
though I was participating in a blind-drug test and was in the placebo
group. I'm not sure exactly what the typical reaction to morphine is,
but I sure didn't have it. All it did was affect my oxygen intake to
the point the oxygen-monitor alarm began sounding. Suddenly I was
breathing through an oxygen tube. That didn't help my chances of
sleeping either. I slept not one wink the first night.
My getting sprung was handled like a
flight delay at the airport. It continued to be postponed in
increments. First it was after noon on Monday and then after dinner
and then Tuesday morning. The doc had warned me that it wouldn't be
Monday morning and to not even ask, but as Monday passed, it became
increasingly apparent that it might not be Monday at all. Finally at
7:00, I texted Jeff, telling him to stand down. I didn't expect to be
released that evening. Still somewhat optimistic, I waited until
after 8:00 to tell the night nurse that if I was going to sleep that
night, I would need a sleep aid of some stripe. She offered to call
the doc.
She returned 10 minutes later with the
offer that I could either get a sleeping pill and spend the night
with an after-breakfast release, or I could go home that night.
Well, the go-home-that-night ship had sailed. I wasn't going to try
to scramble someone at 9:00 at night to come get me. I opted for the
sleeping pill and Tuesday morning departure. I clocked about five
hours of sleep Tuesday night.
When my night nurse opened my room door
at 6:00 Wednesday morning, I was fully awake, and ready to rock and
roll. After taking my vital signs, I had her unhook me. I dressed and
plopped down into the recliner. I realized I needed to ask her
something. Rather than ring the call button, I opened the door to my
room and skipped out to the nurses station. Three or four staff were
huddled there talking. They broke into applause and my nurse remarked
that I was the first patient to ever skip out of an I.C.U. room.
They rushed my breakfast of grits,
yogurt and some other nearly inedible things. It was my first cup of
coffee since Sunday morning. Perhaps the best cup of coffee in my
life!
By 9:30 a.m. I was home and cranked
back in my recliner. I had an assignment due on Thursday morning,
which I wrote that afternoon. Back in the saddle again.
I am currently on what they call a
full-liquid diet; although I cheated last night and had spaghetti. I
won't officially be on the soft diet until my appointment with Doc
Sellner at noon on Tuesday.
But things couldn't be going any
better.
