Post-Surgery (Hours)

This is where it is all fuzzy from the anesthesia and the pain meds.

I remember waking up in recovery. I see a male nurse's back standing at a large countertop in the middle of the open room. I seem to be the only patient in here. I recall realizing I was in so much pain. An intense aching everywhere from my lower ribs down to my hips.

I tried calling out to him but I can't talk, I can't make any noise from my throat. Thinking back now, I'm unaware if I'm intubated still. I suspect I wasn't, I think the reason I couldn't speak was because my throat was so sore from the tube. But I had no issue talking later when I get to my room, you'll see that real soon haha.

The pain is so bad that I need that nurse over here right now to remedy this. So I start banging my fists on the metal bars that protect me from rolling out of the bed. Next thing I remember is someone quieting my fists and saying something about how he's going to help me, just relax.

Next thing I remember is being in my hospital room with my mother, my husband, and my best friend around me. A female nurse came in to check on me, and I remember saying something that made everyone laugh, and she pats my thigh and says, "You are such a trooper." I remember lifting my arms up in front of me, seeing all the wires still attached and saying in a robot-voice, "I am a storm trooper."

If you have never seen the skit of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog at the Star Wars convention from when Conan hosted Late Night, you need to crawl out from under the rock you've been living under and watch it. I've made it really easy for you and here is a link. So that's what that phrase is from.

So my memory is still fuzzy, and my husband says he wishes he recorded more of it, because I remember saying things like, "I'm gonna shoot poop at you from my poop hole." MY best friend Jessica told me she was laughing so hard at the things I was saying she couldn't breathe. The short video my husband did record, I was complaining about "stupid invites to stupid events" on Facebook. My husband tells me that everyone's been asking about how I was doing, and I said, "Yeah everyone must think I died, it took so damn long."

I kept saying that the nurses just, "dumped me here" and wanted to know when I could start pressing my pain pump button. I would like to point out that in no way did the nurses just dump me there, and I was in no pain at all. I think I was just bored and wanted something to do, like push a pain pump button.

Here I am in a nice dilaudid-induced high. I didn't need any oxygen, but as long as I was on the pain pump, I had to keep those things in my nose so it could sense that I was breathing fine. It would beep every time it fell out.

My next post will cover changing my bag for the first time before leaving the hospital. My surgeon (as most surgeons do) had four requirements before I could leave.
1. I could walk on my own without any serious pain.
2. I had passed something besides minimal blood through my stoma
3. I was able to eat without issue.
4. I was comfortable changing my bag.

I met all four requirements by day four and was hope by dinnertime on day 4 :-)!