Susan Arthur

Boring hospital post-- fell free to skip. I"m too fried to LJ cut.

Sun 3 PM
I got to the hospital Sun morning at about 10:30 after a wonderfully uneventful trip. They brought Daddy back from the recovery room about 11:00. Mother had talked to the doctor as soon as surgery was over, and the doc was really happy about how everything went. Surgery went more quickly than expected.

When Daddy started coming out of the anaesthesia, he kept trying to pull the oxygen canula off; it was apparently bothering him. And he didn't like the blood pressure thing on his finger,either. For about half an hour, every time he'd wake up enough, he was trying to pull one or the other off. If it wasn't that, he was trying to take his hospital gown off. (At first the blankets over his private parts; later on he got more ambitious with the gown. They had a block strapped between his legs to keep his hips in the right position-- thank god it came all the way up. I am traumatized anyway. I may never be the same.) When Mother asked him what he was doing, he said "I'm not planning to spend the whole day in here!" She got a huge kick out of that and has told everybody that has come into the room. Some of them she's told several times, the lucky devils.

Sun 8:25 PM
The blood pressure/blood oxygen monitor they had strapped on his finger kept going off. I thought there was something the matter with it. Turns out the monitor was okay, it was the probe that was messed up because he kept picking at it. They finally took it off his finger and taped it on his forehead, so now he's got this glowing red dot stuck on his head. Highly amusing.

He seems to be reasonably coherent but then he'll throw back the sheets and blankets and start trying to get out of bed. I'm in constant danger of being flashed. I say again, EW.

Mother is at home now and I'm here for the night. They won't be giving him any more pain meds till 11 AM so I'm not thinking I'll get much sleep, with him trying to escape and all. I don't think he's able to actually get out of bed. He sure keeps trying, though.

Mon 8:30AM
Lord what a long night. Daddy didn't go to sleep till about 3:30, and I didn't sleep at all. Every time my eyelids drooped, his oxygen monitor went off-- he would breath through his mouth when he went to sleep and
he wasn't getting the oxygen.

We did have a good laugh about 2 AM, I guess it was. He'd been trying to let the rails down, and trying to remove the pillow that has to stay between his knees to keep his hips in the right position, and trying to
take out his catheter. I'd say "No, you can't do that" and he'd sound kind of surprised and say "Oh, okay." He was asking what everything was-- all the machines and such. He wanted to remove the rail they had over his bed for him to pull up on. He manged to disentangle the triangle pull-up bar. He wanted to take off the bed rails. Finally he started reaching for the chair that was a couple of feet away from the bed. I helped move it over to to the bed, and asked, "Why do you want to move the chair?" With great disgust, he said "Because I want to change something. It's awfully frustrating when everything I try to do, I get told no!" and I just cracked up. The sad thing is, even his TV remote doesn't work. I ffgured that would at least be one thing he could control, but no. Not even that.

I saw a lovely dawn this morning. Not the sunrise; the window faces the wrong way for that. What I saw beyond the hospital was fog in all the hollows of the landscape. At the southern horizon I can see the edge of the Smokies. Poking through the fog were the tops of trees in all the fence lines. It was like a miniature version of the scenery that gave the Smoky Mountains their name. Beautiful. AS the sun warmed things up, the fog melted down and barns and houses became visible dotted on the hilltops. It is now revealed in all its gentle beauty.

Mon 2:10
I cam home this morning to try to get some sleep. Mother always wakes up so early, I figured I'd be snoring by 7:30 or so. Nope-- today was the day she overslept. I know she needed it so I was happy for her. By the time she called at 8:00 I was so zoned out (hadn't slept since 7 AM yesterday) that it didn't seem to make much difference. She finally called for me to actually pick her up at 9; by the time we got all the to-ing and fro-ing done it was 10. I got back to the house and crawled into bed; called Amy at 10:15. Dozed off about a quarter to 11. Yay, me. At 11 my brother called, thinking Mother would be here and I'd be at the hospital. Anyway I finally got to sleep. Woke up and felt like it had to be at least 4 hours later, especially since the light from the windows looked so different. When I checked the clock, though, I had only slept an hour and a half. I'm still not convinced that every clock in the house didn't spontaneously re-set itself, and all of them to the exact same time. Adrenaline is a powerful thing.

I have now eaten the first decent meal I've had in days, and caught up on LJ and my email. Whew. Now to go take a shower, put on clean clothes, and go back to the hospital. I expect to see a huge difference-- the epidural will have completely worn off and the PT should have been there and gotten him out of bed to "walk". I figure those two things together will cool his jets a little.

The nurse said he'll have to sleep with that pillow he hates so badly between his knees for six weeks. When I told Mother that, she said, "Oh, no! He'll kill me!" meaning with his unhappiness about it.

I said, "Oh, you can outrun him now! He won't be able to catch you to kill you."

She laughed and said, "Well, I can't run at all."

"Well, you can still hobble faster than he can, at least for a while."
And she finally laughed.

It’s been a weird day physically. Last night I fell as I was starting the bathwater. By sheer luck I managed to not hit my head, but I still landed hard enough that it jerked my head and I started to get a migraine. I hit the Imitrex immediately (I think I’m starting to get the hang of this, now that I’m sure I have enough to last me through the month!) and took ibuprofen to help keep the shoulder and buttal region from being so sore, since that’s where I took the brunt of the weight. I don’t like the fact that I have fallen several times in the last year and a half or so. When I mentioned it to the neurologist she sort of blew it off. I said, Well, I just think it’s weird-- adults just don’t usually fall down. How many times have YOU fallen recently? and she just looked at me like I was crazy. (okay, don’t say a word…) She obviously thought it was ridiculous that I asked if she had fallen. I mean, she’s a grown up and doesn’t just fall down. She didn’t answer me, either.

I was still sore today when I got up and went for a bone density scan. That was wonderfully painless, unlike the second appointment, which was a mammogram. I had the diagnostic version instead of the usual screening one, and of course they cranked the machine a little tighter for that kind. Oh, joy. At least the tech was going to some effort to keep the pressure on for as short a time as possible, unlike the really bad one I had when I swear the tech looked like one of those women in a Wagner opera and was determined to prove she had some serious strength to crank that machine tight. Yow. (Not to mention a serious run-on sentence!) After that they did an ultrasound. That didn’t hurt either but the tech was awfully non-verbal and kept cocking her head back and forth while looking at the monitor and making little hmmm sounds. Unnerving, I have to say. She didn’t help any by saying, “They’ll call you with the results. I’m not allowed to tell you anything else.” Which of course I already knew, but she was rather abrupt about it. Great. Now I get to wait “a couple of weeks” to hear the results. Whee.