![]() ![]() I was shifted from my twin bed to a narrower platform, and the nurses shifted my arms around almost to a point where I felt like Christ on the cross. When they put me under, I did not get the old “Count backward from 100” routine from the terse anesthesiologist. I’d been at the hospital at that point for 15 hours the pain had subsided, because I’d been heavily medicated for a while. So, I was put under anesthesia at 2:30 in the afternoon on Thursday, August 25. On the other hand, this made the whole “take out the appendix” part of the surgery a lot more challenging. On one hand, hats off to my internal organ system for trying to protect me. ![]() My appendix was so dead, in fact, that-again, so I was told-my other organs essentially attempted to protect my entire body from its deleterious effects. You might say it was super-dead (only if you say it like Lin-Manuel Miranda in Hamilton). Once the doctors attempted the ideal, laparoscopic version, they found that my appendix was dead. ![]() I did not have the ideal version of an appendectomy. In this version, she would make three brief incisions in my abdomen, take out my appendix, stitch me up, and that would be that. The ideal version of an appendectomy is a 90-minute procedure, or so I was told by my surgeon. Now that I’m a few weeks out from the surgery, I’m getting back to normal, no longer reacting as mentally viscerally to characters in a less-than-ideal physical situation. with its white-suit-clad scientists or even episodes of “Frasier” where the good doctor gets ill enough to be bedridden was a bit different than before it was as if I’d forgotten that, oh, right, E.T. So I usually don’t think about the physical pain or anguish these characters go through and relate it to myself.īut this time, watching something like E.T. I have a decent immune system, even after having a son who’s now 2 years old and goes to day care and swim lessons, AKA germ factories. I take it for granted that fictional characters in pop culture I enjoy can sometimes go to the hospital for treatment or just get sick, precisely because I spend so little time in the hospital or being sick. For example, watching The Fugitive–a film in which Harrison Ford stitches himself up on the right side of his abdomen after a train wreck–literal hours before having surgery performed on my abdomen was unwise. This wasn’t a deliberate choice on my part each time I remembered what I was getting myself into, I winced. #Mousterpiece cinema zootopia tvWhat’s the opposite of an expectation? Feeling the intense pain of an appendectomy was the opposite of my expectations.Ī surprising amount of movies and TV shows I watched during my pre- and post-operation period involve people getting hurt, sick, or spending time in the hospital. I didn’t even want to imagine the pain that I would suffer otherwise. Did you know it’s super-painful to get your teeth pulled? No fooling! The anesthesia worked when I had my wisdom teeth out, thank God. (Nothing says spring break like recovering on your parents’ couch from dental surgery.) The time before that, I had to get a couple teeth pulled, a procedure made doubly exciting because the anesthesia never kicked in. The last time I had any kind of invasive medical procedure, I was a sophomore in college getting his wisdom teeth out on spring break. The nurse laughed when I mentioned my second expectation-there was little doubt that I’d be knocked out good and proper before any surgical procedure began. The Fugitive was playing on AMC on the TV above the nurse’s head I just wanted to focus on that. I didn’t want to feel any pain, and I didn’t want to be reminded of why I was there. I wanted to focus on anything else, as I’d wanted to once I felt a jabbing pain on the right side of my abdomen the weekend before. “Uh…a successful surgery? To not be awake during any of the surgery?” That was the best I could muster. Is this a trick question? I had been in the hospital for the last 12 or so hours, having driven myself to the ER on a Wednesday evening only to find out that I had acute appendicitis. What are my expectations for today’s procedure? I looked over at my parents and my wife, sitting to my right on an even-less-comfortable couch and chair buttressing the window. “What are your expectations for today’s procedure?” The nurse brightly asked me this question as I rested as comfortably as possible on the twin-mattress hospital bed on the sixth floor of the medical center overlooking the highway and the Arizona Cardinals football stadium that doubles as a large, inflatable gray nipple. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |