Hospital Day 2: Surgery

13 Sep 2011

After a restless night (mainly because of the IV in the arm) I was visited at 6:30am by two nurses, one to measure blood-pressure and temperature, the other to shave my abdomen (the bikini line is so important nowadays :)

At 7:00am the Professor came again with his team and asked if I was ready, and I said I was. A few minutes later I was taken to surgery. The anaesthetist inserted two more IVs, in the back of each hand, and inserted a hypo into one of them. He said 'go to sleep now', and the lights went out.

I awoke in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) with friendly voices around me saying 'hello', 'the operation is over' and 'it all went well'.

The first thing I noticed was that there was little abdominal pain, certainly none internally, just some soreness around the incisions. There was a button on a cord that I could press for self-administered pain relief, via one of my IVs, but I didn't need it. As well as the three IVs I saw there was a drainage tube from bottom-left wound on my tummy. (I was told later that this is place in the abdominal cavity just under the stomach to drain away the fluids they used to wash all the internal surgery, and any blood from the surgery). I also felt the catheter, and this did sting if it moved, so I kept my legs still, so the bedclothes wouldn't disturb it.

Two nurses came later for blood. I offered my IVs, but the first said she couldn't take it from them, they needed the best oxygenated capillary blood, so she took it from my earlobe. The other wanted extremity blood and pricked the end of one of my fingers (the Twilight series has nothing on these girls!).

I was hooked up to an automatic blood-pressure monitor that kicked into action every 15 minutes. It was  135/80 for some of the measurements, and 180/110 for some others. Don't know why the blood-pressure varies like this. It made quite a noise as it squeezed my arm, then released the pressure. I also had a temperature and pulse probe on a finger, and a heartbeat monitor that was attached to those stick-on probes on my upper abdomen.

Typical Intensive Care Unit

There were two other patients besides me in the ICU, and alarms were aways being sounded as someone's urine bag had filled, or a drip had emptied. Expect no sleep on this day, a few dozes is the best that can be had.

The night was very long.