Sunday, October 29
Oct. 30th, 2023 12:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chochiyo_samaSunday, October 29
The alarm went off at 9:05 this morning. I hit the snooze three times. Then I got up because I needed to zoom with DeAnn at 10 am. I did my morning stuff, fed the cats, and cleaned the four litterboxes and swept up the scattered cat litter. I swear they spread that stuff out just to spite me.
I normally don’t eat breakfast, but today, I made myself some scrambled eggs and toast. I just felt like breakfast today. I’m gonna have to buy eggs again soon. I only have six left.
DeAnn and I zoomed till 1:30 pm. She talked about things she needed to do since signing the paperwork on the new house. She will be making payments on both her current house and her new one until she gets the work done on the new house and the upgrades done on her current house so she can sell it for more. We talked about how school was going for her too. I whined about how Lily is driving me crazy. I don’t know how it started, but I also had a little trip down memory lane with her about the months I spent in the rehab facility in 2018 after the appendix burst and I had to have two wound vacs and a drainage bulb.
I don’t think about those days much normally, but today, it swept over me like a series of flashbacks. I remembered how the staff had such a hellacious time getting the IVs into my veins. It took them forever to get one into my vein, and my arm was black and purple and green from my shoulder to the ends of my fingers. Sometimes, I just laid there and cried—not so much because it hurt—though it did hurt like a mother fucker when they kept jabbing the needles in—but because it took so long and it was so frustrating.
I remembered how those damned wound vacs were just a major pain in the ass. Three times a week, Monday/Wednesday/Friday, a group of two or three staff would take me into this enormous shower, strip me naked, and pull off the sticky plastic thing that held the suction thing in the huge open wounds in my side—one from the appendix hole and the other from the hole where they’d scraped out gobs of infection. Then they had to spray down all the black spongy shit that looked like the insulation that goes around a window air conditioner that was packed into that wound so they could pull it out. The tissue from inside my body would attach to that black shit, and just looking at it made me feel nauseated. One of the nurses was a tall young man named Mike. He had enormous hands—and he could put his whole hand into that wound till nothing showed but his wrist coming out of it. They’d just toss that black spongy shit on the floor of the shower—it had little flecks of the tissue from inside my body stuck to it. It was just as gross and disgusting as hell. Then this really nice nurse would hose down the inside of the wound with the shower spray attachment. You’d think it would hurt, but it really didn’t—unless the water was too hot—then it hurt some.
The really nice nurse would talk about her little girl who was about 18 months old while she scrubbed me down. When that was happening, I had flashbacks of when I was a very little girl and my mother used to bathe my sister and me in the kitchen sink. So many people saw me stark naked while I was in the hospital that it didn’t even bother me anymore—and I have always been very self-conscious and embarrassed by my big fat body.
I remember that they must have used twenty towels every time they showered me. They laid four or five of them on the floor so I didn’t slip in the shower when I stood up so they could rinse the soap off me. The three nurses all had towels and toweled me off after the shower—the towels were not very fluffy and got saturated with water pretty quick. They’d just drop them on the floor when that happened and grab more towels.
They brought me a tooth brush and a cup of water while I sat on the little bench thing in the shower, and I’d brush my teeth sitting there like that. It was surreal. Like being in a dream, except I was awake.
When I was clean and dry, they put one of those hospital gowns on me, open in the front and put a towel over the wounds because they seeped pale pink fluid until they got fresh black spongy shit packed in them with the suction things. Between the shower and the wound specialist coming in to do that, they laid me out on the bed and covered me with the sheet. Sometimes I waited nearly an hour for the wound guy to show up. Dribbling my fluids on the sheets and towels.
The wound guy was like a head nurse too. He was very kind, and was a very talented singer. When he packed that black shit in the wound and put that suction thing in, he always sang the Ballad of Poncho and Lefty while he installed the wound vacs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoKvUYbGu7A&ab_channel=MerleHaggardVEVO
He told me how his dad had played that song over and over and over again while he was recovering from a boating accident—his dad had been in a small fishing boat when a bigger power boat ran over his little boat. His dad was flung into the water, and the propeller of the big boat roared right over him. Cut him to shreds. It was a miracle the man survived, but it took him months to recover. The whole time, he listened to that song over and over. The kids all learned to sing the song. Now, he and his siblings sing at community events, and are pretty talented.
After they dealt with that, they brought me breakfast. I ate a lot of cheerios, as I recall. Most of the food they had there was so over seasoned that I could not eat it. When they had nothing I felt was fit to eat, I ate Cheerios. I also ate a lot of chicken noodle soup and beef and barley soup. Also, plates of raw vegetables dipped in ranch dressing, peanut butter and jelly on toast, and Ginger Ale.
I dropped weight like crazy. I lost almost 100 lbs. in just a few months.
Mike, the nurse, always teased me that I was going to turn into a Cheerio because that was always what I asked for. I was shocked that they always let me have them. I suppose it was because I just never ate whatever else they brought me. I hate almost every kind of seasoning. Especially when they have it piled on so thick that you might as well have upended a jar of oregano or whatever other nasty shit they had on that food directly into your mouth.
Those damned wound vacs were sealed onto my skin by some plastic sheets that were sticky. They would not stick tight. I always woke up in the night, laying in a puddle of salt water—because the wound vacs would spray salt water into the wound, leave it sit for a while, and then suck it back out again. It was a very odd and disturbing sensation. But when the plastic sticky shit didn’t stick, it all came out, soaking me and the bedding.
I’d have to press the call button, and since there were not many people on my section of the floor—long-termers, like me—every one of them would come in to try to fix it. Four or five of them would come in, crawl onto the bed with me, and try to get it to seal up. They’d also have to change the wet bedding. They were all girls, and we’d laugh our heads off in the middle of the night, trying to deal with that shit. We’d always sing that silly song by Little Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus—Old Town Road.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7qovpFAGrQ&ab_channel=LilNasXVEVO
We’d sing the whole damned song. We knew all the words. “Gonna take my horse to the old town road….Gonna ride till I can’t no more….” And we laughed our asses off every time.
I look back on this stuff now—rarely—and I cannot believe it was real. It seems like a really weird dream that I had once a long time ago now.
Some days I was so depressed when I was there that I just slept all day. And I cried a lot some days. The bed was hard and uncomfortable, and the recliner was dreadful. It cut off the circulation to my legs, and my feet swelled up like loaves of bread.
I don’t know that I could live through something like that again.
It was pretty dreadful.
Most of the people were really nice. They gave me oxy whenever I asked for it—I usually only wanted it before they did that wound care which was very unpleasant. Though sometimes, I wanted it at bedtime because I couldn’t sleep. That was the nice thing about oxy—it put me right to sleep.
I never developed any kind of dependence on it, though. As soon as I was back in my own bed in my own home, I didn’t have trouble sleeping any more.
Weirdly, the right side of my body where the deep wounds were still hurts almost every day. Not unbearably painful, but it hurts. I suspect it always will.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-30 10:44 am (UTC)I haven't had eggs in months. Since I left my parent's house. I used to occasionally make a scrambled egg sandwich or hard boil them for pesto deviled eggs but haven't felt like doing much of anything. I still have the steaks and two hamburgers that I grilled in the freezer. I will probably eat at least one burger this week. I also have some pork egg rolls.
Deann must be doing well if she can afford to pay two mortgages and still pay for remodeling on two houses. Has she considered keeping her current house and just renting it out for income? She could most likely charge enough rent to cover the mortgage, insurance and property taxes and possibly have a little extra as income. The house could pay for itself and when it is paid off, all the more profit. It's what I had originally planned for my house.
If you could live through that horror and still come out normal and have cheerful days, laugh and enjoy life, you can survive anything.
I suspect that inner pain is from scar tissue pulling when you move and stuff.
I'm grateful that when my appendix was getting ready to burst I recognized the symptoms and drove myself to the ER. They admitted me and removed my appendix that night. What I didn't appreciate was none of them told me how long to stay home and recover. So I was back to school in a week, clutching my stomach so it wouldn't jiggle as I walked as I was in pain because my Mother didn't want me taking any pain meds because she was afraid I would get addicted. The doctor didn't tell me how long to stay out, just at one of my checkups asked if I was ready to go back to work. I didn't know how long it took to recover so I thought a week was normal. I am so pissed I listened to all those assholes. The school secretary was wonderful and let me use her parking spot close to the door so I wouldn't have to walk the length of the parking lot. Another teacher was amazed I was back as she said her husband was out for three weeks. I should have stayed out for three weeks too. The only thing that saved me was the fires broke out and school was closed for a week. Then the next day we came back was a staff development. And then I got shingles and was out for two more weeks. That was a god send as I didn't hurt any more. Instead I was itchy and burning. And Caesar was in heaven. I was home for almost a month total and he spent it all with me. That was right before he died on November 13th. I had my appendix out on October 2, my Mom's birthday. I'm so grateful I had that month with Caesar. That was the year I turned 50 and my body pretty much started to fall apart around then. Hypertension. Pre-diabetes. High Cholesterol. And I started to have back problems. Pisses me off that there was a shot they could have given me for the Shingles but it has to be within 72 hours of onset and the asshole doctor diagnosed me but didn't give me anything. I didn't know about the shot until too late. That's when I really started to google stuff and educate myself about what I had and what could be done.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-30 04:27 pm (UTC)Wound vaca are freaky something. I had a far smaller setup than yours and I kept tripping over it and catching it on stuff as I dragged it behind me like a ball and chain
I’m glad the medical staff were good to you. That is literally their job, taking care of people. They saw actually ugly things. A fat lady needing wound care wouldn’t faze them at all