A couple of weeks ago, I had my first surgery involving general anesthesia. About three weeks ago, I had a little low-speed scooter accident and broke a knee–broke it into several pieces, apparently. After a week on my back in traction, I was in surgery for six and a half hours. Then two more weeks in the hospital, still on my back, and finally today I was allowed to come home. I’m still mostly on my back, but I can sit up long enough to type a little.
I realize that knee surgery is probably pretty simple compared to major organ surgery. My best friend had a liver transplant a year ago, for crying out loud, and no doubt that was many times worse. Still, in my relatively comfortable 47 years, I had simply never had any idea that anything could be so unpleasant as the first 12 hours after waking up. I came to in a bright, clean room, so bright and so clean I thought I was in a science fiction movie. I felt nothing at first. The doctor was saying something about how the bone alignment looked pretty good. After that his mouth kept moving, but I could hear nothing except what seemed to be a howl coming from the floor, ceiling and walls, as I was engulfed in a tsunami of pain. I became aware of physical sensation in the following stages.
First, I noticed that my damaged leg was in a massive vise, and a huge ogre of some sort was pounding my heel with a sledgehammer. (The traction had been effected by means of a hole drilled through my heel; I suspect that was responsible for the heel pain.)
Next, in spite of the apparent cleanliness of the operation room and our location in the Orient, somehow an Amazonian Candiru fish had lodged itself in my urethra and was spreading its spines. This later turned out to be a catheter, which seemed quite unnecessary to me. I hadn’t had a drop of fluid in any form for 16 hours before surgery–how much urine could I have passed? Seems to me a diaper would have done just fine. It isn’t as though I had much dignity intact at that point anyway. The worst thing is that they left the thing in for the following night. Even after surgery, a sleeping man tends to get erections, and they proved so painful with the catheter installed that I woke abruptly each time one began. It was a very sleepless night. When someone removed the catheter the next morning, it seemed to have been lubricated with sand.
After my urethra, I became aware of my throat. I tried to speak, to croak out a demand for euthanasia, but my throat was so dry that my tongue stuck to the top of my mouth. I tried to clear my throat, and damaged my uvula in the process. It ached for a week. (What the heck is that thing for, anyway?) Although my throat was so dry I thought it had been torched, I was not allowed any water for several hours. I’m sure there was a good reason, just like with the catheter.
Then I realized I was cold. As I was wheeled out into the hall, I started shivering. Not really shivering–I was convulsing, more like bucking. My wife and a couple of nurses had to hold me down to keep me from falling off the bed. Of course I was drenched in sweat a minute later, but I remained cold for the next few days.
Finally, I noticed that my pajama pants didn’t match the shirt. The pants had the old hospital logo, and the shirt the new. (Well, it matters to me.)
All this misery continued for about 12 hours. The next 12 hours were noticeably less horrible, but still very bad.
So I’m curious: was this typical? I think of knee surgery as relatively minor, but I swear that if I could have found a stray scalpel somewhere, I would not be writing this now. For days (and sometimes still) I thought it would have been better if I had just been shot in the head as I lay on the curb waiting for the ambulance–they used to do that with lame horses on the old TV shows, and I doubt that I’m as valuable to anyone as a horse was to an old-time cowboy. Am I just a total wimp? I’ve always thought of myself as having a pretty average threshold of pain, but I seriously, seriously wanted to die. Eventually I did get some pretty strong “pain killers,” which didn’t seem to do much for the pain but did give me some extremely bizarre visions. I wish I were a good enough artist to recreate them.
Does anyone have a story to share that might make me feel better about my wimpitude? If you insist, you can even tell about the time you chewed off your own leg to escape from a bear trap, then dragged yourself 15 miles to the nearest camp, all without so much as an aspirin, though that won’t make me feel better.
I’ve learned that I have an oddly high threshold for pain. I had all four done at the same time, two bony impacted. Though I did have one odd side effect. My tongue turned green! I called my oral surgeon and he said it was a side effect of the anasthesia. I had never heard of that before, but he recommended getting a tongue scraper and it would eventually just go away. It did, but for a while there I had a green fuzzy tongue! Ewwww.
or surgery :rolleyes: