Being a patient at my hospital. Weird and Painful.

I have just spent time in my own hospital as a patient and finally got home the other day. Talk about weird being on the other side of the fence.


My pseudo-vacation started at 5am (too darn early) with check in at the hospital. Mom is the one who is taking care of me and took me to the hospital. She was a nervous wreck and I was just impatient to get it over with because I was hungry, craving my diet Pepsi, and knew that it would fix all my problems.


Funny enough I kept getting visitors even before I started when everyone there realized that I was a patient this time. They assured me that they would take care of me and we were all joking around. I am sure it looked weird for other patients watching us. Dark humor and all.

As for the surgery it was supposed to last 1 1/2 hours and ended up going for 3 hours. The doc discovered more damage and had a bunch of stuff to repair, add tissue grafts (Pork of all things), and remove tissue. He basically had to reconstruct the whole lower half of my tummy, girlie parts, kidneys, intestines, bladder, and colon. Ick!!!!


I woke up to massive pain. I had a really hard time with them getting my pain under control. I am allergic to alot of pain meds so the options were pretty limited and they usually start at the lowest dose and work their way up from there. Took longer than I wanted before they got it right.

After surgery I spent a few days on the floor recuperating and trying to control my pain with the meds. My first evening there was really rough and at one point I had to wait an hour before I could get the next dose of pain med because I was at the max dose. I was sitting there quietly crying and even the nurse was near tears herself. She said how sorry she was but I told her I understood, it is not her fault. The weird thing to deal with was lots of tubes, iv's, oxygen, contraptions, and monitors attached everywhere. It would take 2 nurses to just accomplish the task of getting me unhooked for a walk or to just roll over in bed. Nice thing was that I had lots of visitors and got many flowers. It was so sweet of everyone that brought me flowers.

I will say that the most embarrassing moment during my stay was having no modesty. My supervisor stopped by my room to say hi and see how I was doing. About 30 min. after he left my nurse said that I needed to get up and take a lap around the unit. So here I am shuffling down the hallway with that gown that covers nothing, socks on my feet, and hair sticking up everywhere. I looked up and saw my supervisor go by me and wave Hi. OMG!!!!!! I wanted to die right there. I was walking down the hallway with a pee bag hanging from my IV pole. In my room I was able to hide it from him with my blankets but not out there, hanging front and center on that pole for the whole world to see.

The weirdest thing is that they have a checklist of things that must be done before you are discharged. One of them was embarrassingly, "Have you farted yet?" I said "Excuse me????" with a shocked look on my face. This is to tell them that your insides are not asleep anymore and working properly.


I finally got home yesterday and I am enjoying the peace and quiet as well as I can with an air show going on next door at the base. My current goal is to be able to walk around normally and not look like an old 100 yr. old lady stooped over with a shuffle step.