I'm Tired of Almost Dying

 

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Warning: this post contains medical photos, which some may find disturbing.  

It also contains poorly-Photoshopped photos, which many will find even more disturbing.

Reader discretion is advised.

Earlier this month, the date arrived for Savasana Kombucha's delivery.  This was a joyfully-anticipated event for Bee, who seemed to think that getting rid of my 11 cm fibroid was going to solve all my problems.  (From depression to back pain to back boobs.)

I was a little more ambivalent . . . or just more realistic.  I mean, I was interested in seeing if I suddenly dropped a bunch of weight (even though Doctor Google said most fibroids hardly weigh anything), but I wasn't expecting huge changes to pain or hormones. 

2 days before surgery

What I really wasn't expecting, though, was how nervous I got, 10 days before my surgery, after attending my pre-surgery appointment.  I wasn't so concerned about the verbal warnings my doctor gave me ("don't lift more than 20 pounds", "risk of infection from surgery", blah blah blah): but I began getting concerned after I got home and started perusing the folder of info the hospital sent with me.  These warnings were much more dire: don't lift more than a gallon of milk; don't push a broom; don't expect to get rest at the hospital as you're going to be constantly checked on and poked after your surgery. 

I remembered these warnings from when I had my C-section 14 years ago to deliver Mr. C.  And so, of course, I spent the 10 days between this pre-surgery appointment and my actual planned fibroid surgery date remembering: I remembered the trauma of having a preemie.  I remembered the coldness of the hospital.  I remembered the nights spent alone there as the monitor alarms went off for unknown reasons.  I remembered -- exhausted and fragile -- slowly wheeling the stand with my IV bag down the hallway at midnight, on my way to the fridge in the healthy baby nursery so I could store a tiny bag of milk I'd pumped for my own baby, who was relegated to the perpetually dark and sterile basement of the NICU 6 floors below me.

And so I began to associate the potential trauma of this upcoming surgery with the trauma (and aftermath) of that surgery 14 years ago.  A trauma I hadn't realized I was still carrying.

Two days before Savasana was due to be extracted, I went into my doctor's for a mandatory COVID test.  As the nurse swabbed my nostrils, I braced myself and asked how recovery from a hysterectomy compared to recovery from a C-section.

"Oh," she said, "it'll be a walk in the park compared to a C-section!  You'll still have pain, of course, but what most women feel is just a few days of discomfort from gas build-up, since they have to pump your abdomen with gas during the surgery, and that takes a bit to dissipate."

OK.  I could handle that.  After all, I was back to my very-physical job 2 weeks after my C-section.  And that surgery required a five-day hospital stay.  Barring complications, which I didn't expect, this was just supposed to be overnight.  

So I spent those last days before surgery "nesting": I made sure Princess Bed was ready to receive me, and that my nightstand was Zen and clutter-free.  I cleaned the house so I wouldn't come home and be anxious by mess while I was convalescing.  I bought one of those Pillow Pad thingies so I could lay my tablet or a book on it and more-comfortably read in bed, and I hinted -- not at all subtly -- to Mr. C that a lovely present for me would be a new, comfy blanket.

The morning of the surgery arrived, and I was up before 5 a.m.: downing the prescribed 8 ounces of apple juice and anti-nausea medication, plus showering and scrubbing (and waiting and rinsing and scrubbing again) the anti-bacterial medical soaps the hospital had very specifically instructed me to use before surgery.

By 6 a.m., Bee and I were at the surgery center.  By 6:20, I was in a hospital gown and answering pre-surgery questions.

"Have you removed all your jewelry?" the nurse asked.

"Yes," I said, already feeling naked without my wedding ring.  "Oh, except I have a navel ring that I don't even know how to remove, so I think I'll just leave it."  (Who cares if it gets trashed?  And, anyway, they weren't cutting through my belly button.) Bee nodded his agreement.

The nurse looked skeptical.  "I'll have to get a consent form for you to sign if you want to leave it in," she said.  "There are risks, like cauterization of the navel ring when they're closing your incision site."

It's funny how quickly you and your spouse figure out how to remove a 12-year-old piercing once you hear the phrase "risk of cauterization".

I don't remember much after that.  I was hoping to remember being wheeled into surgery, and counting backwards into anesthesia, and waking back up . . . all things I remembered from that other surgery, 14 years ago, and that I really wanted to pay attention to this time.  Alas, the drugs must have been different: all I remember as I write this is going from being in the check-in room to being in a post-op room with Bee, and almost immediately being wheeled through corridors and up elevators to the 6th floor of the main hospital to recover over there.

When the surgeon had come to the pre-op room early that morning, I told her how we'd already named the fibroid, and how weird it would be to have it just gone without being able to see it.  "Can you take a picture or something?" I asked, hopefully.

"Sure!" she said.  "I'll have one of the assistants do that."

"You should have seen it," Bee told me later, with wonder, as he and I were alone in my hospital room.  "The doctor came to see me in the waiting room and she said the surgery had gone beautifully: just a perfect procedure.  And then she showed me the photo on her phone." He shuddered. "That thing was huge."

"Hey," I snapped, "don't call your baby a 'thing'!"  But I knew it was just misplaced aggression: I really wanted to see the photo, and I just had to hope the surgeon kept it on her phone until she saw me on her rounds.

As it turns out, it was totally worth the wait:

my uterus, with 6-inch ruler for reference

Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce Savasana Kombucha, delivered Wednesday, October 5, at approximately 8:10 a.m.?  Weighing 2.4 pounds, and measuring 15 cm.  (And, yes: after lab-testing, Savasana proved to be cancer-free . . . just stoopid-big.)

This is usually the part in the announcement where they say, "Mother and baby are resting and doing fine."  Except . . . 

Except I wasn't doing fine.  As that day progressed, I started getting a pain in my stomach.  That night, it spread up into my chest and radiated out my ribcage and towards my shoulders.  It felt like a terrible mix of burning acid reflux and really bad gas that wouldn't dissipate.

I figured it was my fault: I'd forgotten I was supposed to hydrate like crazy the day before surgery, and I'd hardly hydrated at all.  Hadn't the doctor said something about hydrating so I wouldn't get gas?  Hadn't the nurse said they were also going to fill my abdomen with gas?  I'd been so careful about following all the other instructions: how had I forgotten to just drink some water so I could prevent this pain?

But my bloodwork was also showing really high white blood cell counts, and creosote levels, and I was having trouble peeing.  (Which, may I add, was made worse by the fact that the hospital staff apparently removed my catheter 12 hours before they were supposed to?  But I digress.)

Apparently, I would not be going home after just one night in the hospital.  No, it was now 7 pm on the day after surgery, and I was being wheeled down to the basement to have one of those scans that takes place in the scary tubes you see on TV.  As it turns out, it wasn't as scary as the TV ones: but it DID take an hour of lying on a gurney under a threadbare sheet as I was periodically pushed in and out of the machine and told to hold my breath for 8 seconds, then had dye pumped into my abdomen and was left alone on that cold gurney for 15 minutes while they waited for the dye to travel through my body, then pushed in and out of that machine again.  All while feeling very vulnerable, with my freshly-glued-back-together abdomen barely protected under a thin hospital gown and threadbare sheet, as the pain in my stomach and chest and tips of my shoulders just got worse and worse.

I was loopy, and kept dozing off.  But eventually someone came in and confirmed what the doctor had predicted when she checked on me a few hours before: there was urine in my abdomen, which means my bladder had been nicked during surgery and I was going to have to go back -- like, RIGHT NOW -- to be re-opened and have my bladder patched.

And now it was around 9 pm, and they reunited my gurney with Bee, and we were on our way to some surgery room somewhere.  And they asked some more pre-surgery questions, and they all left to do . . . something.

As I shook with cold and pain under that ineffectual sheet on that stupid gurney, it was one of those terrible, horrible, no good, very bad moments for Bee and me.

But, to the hospital staff, it was just a Thursday.  Bee listened to his wife breathing hard and moaning as two nurses typing at computers 15 feet away discussed a movie they wanted to see.  

I felt like I'd been lying on that gurney for an hour.  "What are they waiting on?" I whimpered to Bee.  "I hurt so much.  Can't they just put me under right now and finish getting ready while I'm unconscious?"

I doubt I was that verbose.  I probably said something more like: "Hurts bad.  What the f*ck?"

Bee finally called the nurses over, but that is right around the time I unfortunately once-again go blank and can't remember a thing.  Which is frustrating: why does your brain remember every hour of excruciating pain, but stubbornly refuse to recall the few seconds you happily spent crooning "Sweet Caroline" as the anesthesia kicked in?

At any rate, my overnight hospital stay for a hysterectomy/fibroid removal turned into a four-day stay to recover from emergency bladder surgery, as well.  To add insult to injury, I then had to go home dragging a catheter bag for 10 days.  

If you ever want to experience low self-confidence,  just get yourself one of those: it's not just about the potential of having your bodily functions on full display . . . it's also about questioning those functions all the time.  Is the tubing working?  My urine seems stuck in the tubing and not emptying into the bag.  They said I can't let my bladder fill up; is everything draining fine?  They said not to let the urine backtra-- it just shot back into my urethra; that f*cking hurt! Is that blood, or just a tiny flake of tissue staining this batch?  Should I call the off-hours duty nurse?

Being hyper-aware of this bag-and-tubing for 10 days just sort of sucked.  My first post-surgery check-up wasn't supposed to be for a week, but I wished they automatically made you an appointment 3 days after hospital releases in any case where they send you home with a catheter.  Particularly since my catheter tubing was weirdly long (like, about 5 feet long), so I started tripping over it whenever I moved around the house.

I spent most of those 10 days camped out on our couch under my new comfy blanket (thanks, Mr. C!), watching Disney+ and attempting to Photoshop Savasana into family pictures.  

take ME out to the ball game!

But Bee and I usually went for a short walk each afternoon.  And towards the end of those 10 days, I did hide the catheter bag inside a tote and disguise the tubing amongst a long sweater (my pink sweater/robe actually came in handy!) so that I could attend a few school/Scout meetings that I didn't want to miss.

On the day the catheter was to be removed, I had to go to the hospital for another set of scans to make sure my bladder had healed.  And it was another case of me on a cold gurney, having a terrible time, while -- to the 3 radiology techs standing around staring at me -- it was just another Monday.  

And then they stared at me some more (obviously they don't get a lot of visitors down there) while they waited for the Head Radiology tech to come.  And then the 4 of them  -- in a dazzling statement of solidarity -- stared at me, perplexed, as they discussed how to administer the dye through my catheter when this catheter tubing was a different size than their usual catheter tubing.  And then they stared at me as if expecting me to know how to solve this issue before Head Radiologist decided to call down the hallway to the surgery center to see if they had any matching tubing. And then the OG 3 stared at me  as I asked why I hadn't been given the normal-sized tubing ("supply challenges") and what it meant if they couldn't find tubing ("reschedule you for a different day"; to which I nearly started crying).  (While they stared at me.)

Luckily, after some more intense staring, Head Radiologist eventually MacGyvered some tubing to my tubing, and the scan went on as normal.  And found no leaking into my abdomen, so that was a win!

They seemed a little sad to release me from their dungeon lair, but I was finally allowed to walk over to the urologist's to have the catheter removed.  Christmas!

I had hoped getting rid of that damn catheter bag would immediately help me feel optimistic that I was healing, but such was not the case: one's bladder doesn't just bounce back to "business as usual" after 10 days with a plastic bag doing part of its job.  It was another annoying blow to my self-confidence to have to spend the next week wondering if I was peeing too much or too little and if it would ever again not hurt to pee and if I'd ever return to emptying my bladder in one glorious go.  You know, just normal stuff one never has to think about.

We are now 4 weeks past surgery, and I'm starting to feel almost normal.  

TOP: this morning; BOTTOM: 4 weeks ago

I have returned to work, but I'm not back to exercising with Pam yet.  I am doing laundry, but I'm not lifting more than about 10 pounds.  However, I'm also not taking the stairs by tilting my body 20 degrees to the side, leaning my shoulder against the wall, and "sliding" my way up or down, step by step.  

Ahh, memories.

As the bad memories slowly begin to fade, I try to take advantage of the good parts of having had major abdominal surgery (twice).  Like the part where I can just claim I can't lift anything heavy, so everyone else at Cub Scouts has to carry the awkward Rubbermaid tote full of juice pouches down to the storage closet.  Or the part where I can just say, "I'm tired" and stop in the middle of whatever I'm doing to go watch TV instead.  Or the part where the Ex-Parents-In-Law-By-Marriage assumed I wouldn't be able to attend their birthday party a mere 2 weeks after surgery, so they were most pleased when I arrived and spent the evening fussing over me and making me -- instead of the 85-year-old birthday boy -- the center of attention.  

I mean, I love attention.  I want attention.  But I don't want to want attention, so I generally redirect it elsewhere, lest I seem weak.  But, when one is already weak with a perfectly valid excuse, an excuse not one person could begrudge, why not glory in the side effects brought on by that vulnerability?

Unfortunately, I am feeling stronger every day.  I no longer can ask Mr. C or S.B. to carry my laundry down to the basement without feeling remorse.  I can't hog the remote and force Bee to watch another house remodel show without feeling bad.  Damn guilt!  I will, however, continue to yawn in peoples' faces and lay my head on my hand after 30 minutes of interaction and not feel rude for doing so.  (I just need to deal with the fact that, almost daily, someone likes to tell me I "look tired", even if I was feeling pretty good at the time.)  (Having one person say that once tells me they care.  Having several people say that over several days tells me I look like shit.)

I tend to be a relatively healthy person.  I'm hardly sick, and -- when I am -- I usually just power through it and not ask for much help.  I rarely allow myself to be vulnerable.

But it's come as a shock to realize how often I've nearly died because of things that had to do with my uterus. A hundred years ago I would have been one of those women who died during childbirth.  Because my bladder was nicked while removing my uterus, I could have died of sepsis (how very "World War II" of me).  

I don't blame my uterus.  It did me good for a long time, and it's not the uterus' fault things went awry; it just happened to get caught in the crossfire.  I'll miss 'ya, old girl.  

Furthermore, I shall be forever thankful for it, as it brought me two of the most-important things in my life: 

this year's holiday card