This is Not The Surgery I Ordered, Sir

I got a gentle nudge that I hadn’t written anything about my surgery in specific, and how the recovery is going. I can’t promise I’ll share all the horrid details, but I hope you’ll feel like you know what’s going on.

So last Thursday I started having lower abdominal cramps around 4pm. (Right after I posted, in fact.) I get these from time to time, and lately I’ve had some serious hurty bouts of them, so I figured it was one of those and slowed down and started watching my Netflix and trying to wait it out.

About two hours later, I started getting seriously nauseous. Also not alarming for Dels, so I took one nausea med, and then the other, stronger one when that didn’t seem to help. The cramps were getting pretty serious, and showed no signs of slowing down.

I really fought the idea of going to the ER, because I’ve been to the ER with ab pain before and one of two things happen – either they find nothing and I go home and eventually feel better, or on rarer occasions, it’s something really serious and I end up going through a medical ordeal. Neither of these appealed to me, and usually if I just wait, they go away.

I tell Ninja that if I”m still in pain at 8:30 I’ll entertain the idea of going. It comes and goes. Maybe the cramps are getting better, or maybe I’m convincing myself of this so I don’t have to go to the ER. 9:30 comes and goes, and it’s getting worse. Finally, at 10 o’clock we decide that at the very least, I might be able to get some heavy duty pain meds if I go, so we find someone to take us (yeah, remember that we both don’t drive? So we were calling friends at 10:30 at night looking for someone to take us!) and go directly to the actual hospital and not the more local ER extension. Although I’ll be seen faster at the extension, if it’s serious there’s only so much they can do before they have to transport me via ambulance to the “real” hospital, so we might as well just go there.

Let’s cut to the chase and say that I was in the ER for 36 hours without sleep or food. They kept moving me around, and once tried to move me to Labor and Delivery. They let me know that I needed surgery by telling me they had called The Weight Loss Surgeon (we’ll call him Dr. WLS) with whom I have some bad history. I wasn’t thrilled, but I knew why they did it – he’s also a general surgeon and because of his experience with bariatric patients, he’s the best surgeon to do abdominal surgery on someone like me. I later learned that I had a ventral hernia – my second – and it needed to be fixed.

This is what a ventral hernia looks like from the inside. Basically, part of your intestine breaks through the abdominal wall and can get trapped. It hurts quite a bit.

Dr. WLS shows up and the first thing he says to me is, “Weren’t you supposed to have weight loss surgery by now?” He and I have a bit of a back and forth, with me telling him that my neuro thinks that the rapid weight loss I experienced while under Dr. WLS care last time caused or exacerbated my neurological condition. Dr. WLS disagrees, telling me I likely have early onset Parkinsons (!!), and he demands to know who my neuro is. I tell him, and later on he actually called the neuro to demand why the neuro told me this when it was impossible. The neuro stuck to his guns, but Dr. WLS just dismisses this.

Anyway, I tell Dr. WLS that I’m not interested in weight loss surgery. He tells me that I have 3 options – I can go home and do nothing, but this is dangerous and can lead to serious complications, I can go to another hospital that “specializes in hernia repair” (he actually listed two other hospitals with bariatric units), or I can listen to his lectures on weight loss surgery and he’ll do the repair that night. He is surprised when I tell him I need time to think it over. I call patient advocacy and they aren’t pleased with these options.

Dr. WLS returns, a little cowed. We agree to disagree, and I make him promise that if he does the surgery, that he won’t bring up weight loss at all, or weight loss surgery in specific, until I’m seeing him in his office for surgery follow up. He agrees.

I am brought directly from the ER to pre-op, and I don’t know if I have a room to go to when they’re finished. They actually warn me that I may need to go back to the ER if they don’t have a room. This makes pre-op so much more fun. [insert Mike the Surgical Nurse story here]

The surgery goes well. I am wheeled into post op and I hurt all over. Not only from the surgery, but also from being in one position for so long, and also because I’ve had all kinds of tubes in me, some of which were still in (a nasal trumpet, which sounds more whimsical than it is, and a foley catheter). After a few hours, I’m taken up to a real room.

I was given an epidural to help with the surgical pain. It does okay – I still felt some discomfort when I moved, and I was hitting the dose button often – but I end up going into opiate withdrawal because they deny me my maintenance pain meds for over 48 hours and the epidural isn’t enough to ward that off. The hospitalist decided I am on too much OxyContin and cuts my (prescribed by my pain doc) dose in half. Somewhere along the way, they also tell me that my A1C is three points higher than it was six months ago, and now I need mealtime insulin. I’m baffled by this but do not argue.

Unfortunately, it wasn't tequila. Might have worked better.

Fast forward through some bad  nurses. It gets to be time to remove the epidural. Dr. WLS tells me that they’re going to walk me from the epidural to IV pain meds to oral pain meds. This is not what happens. They take the epidural away and I am given less pain medication than I take on a day-to-day basis to cope with the surgical pain. Obviously, this fails to quell the pain I’m experiencing. I stop eating food, and when doctors/nurses try to encourage me to eat, I tell them that I want to, and I will when my pain is below an 8. It takes almost 12 hours before finally I’m given a bolus of IV dilaudid, and am given the option of IV push pain meds to supplement the orals.

However, I’m totally guilted by everyone – the hospitalist, Dr. WLS, and even the nurses – every time I ask for IV meds. I can’t go home until my pain is controlled by orals, they say. I tell them that it’s insane to think that my day to day maintenance drugs are going to be enough to cope with not one, but three incisions in my abdomen, one of which is on a part of my body that experiences a lot of pressure when I sit up or walk. Even the night before I was discharged, I got a dose of IV meds. But they’re so keen to send me home, and at this point I’ve had less than six hours sleep in six days, I just nod my head and agree to whatever they say.

I get home and call my pain management doc just to inform them that I was in the hospital, and that I was given a med to deal with pain but that it was cleared by the hospital with them. They tell me that no one ever told them about the med, and if I have already filled it I am in breach of my contract. Thank the Gods I hadn’t. I get their okay to fill the med, but only if I stop taking my other breakthrough med. This sucks because the hospital’s plan was to augment my regular drugs with the new drug, not replace one of them. So needless to say I’ve been in some pretty bad pain since I’ve been home. But I have slept like I invented sleep, and that’s been good.

Just keep going until you feel less sugary, I guess.

If that weren’t enough, I was sent home with insulin, but with no instructions on how much to administer. I had to call the hospital’s diabetes educator, who was deeply embarrassed and shocked when I told her that no one told me how much to give myself. What’s funny, is that since being home, I rarely test high enough to warrant insulin, and when I do, it’s just over the limit for the lowest dose. I am having my A1C retested at my primary care doc’s next week; I think something hinky is going on.

Tomorrow I see the pain doc, and I’m praying together we can find a way to get my pain under better control. As of now, I can basically lay down (on one side, because I have a drain in the other), sit up for short periods of time, and waddle to the bathroom. Anything more than that is too taxing, pain wise.

The other surgeries, the D&C and the ablation, are on hold for now. I’m hoping to be well enough by mid-May to get them then.

And I’m bringing my nutritionist/trainer to the follow-up appointment with Dr. WLS, so she can tear him a new one if he tried to put me on protein shakes or threatens surgery. I like having attack jaguars.

So that’s where things are. I hate that this happened, I hate the timing of it, I am very serious about wanting to address why I keep having hernias (I have a weak ab wall; my trainer is all over working on that once I am healed from surgery), but for now all I want to do is sleep a lot.