Another anniversary

A year ago today, I was woken before dawn and told to take a shower. I asked for - and was promised - "something to calm my nerves"; it never came. So, I was wheeled down to theatre, very jittery indeed. And then I was left on a trolley for around twenty minutes before anything happened. I remember the anaesthetist was wearing a three-piece suit and very expensive soap! The next thing I recall is waking up in my hospital bed.

As promised, there were no tubes up my nose, though there were several lines into my arms, and I was very tired. A few hours later, it became clear I was allergic to the morphine that was given (self-administered) for pain relief. And then it emerged that I was allergic to codeine, too. So, the only pain relief I had after major surgery was paracetemol. However, if you end up with the same problem, I have to say that paracetemol in sufficient dose does numb pain.

You may be worried about nausea after anaesthetic. So was I. One of my ward mates was terribly sick when she got back from theatre. I wasn't. Indeed, I was hungry! I wasn't sick until the next day, possibly more as a result of hospital food than a bad reaction to anaesthetic!

These days, you have to wear pressure stockings when you're in hospital, in order to ensure you don't get blood clots in your legs. Now, you would think, wouldn't you, that after abdominal surgery, the hospital staff might help you with your surgical stockings when you want to have a shower? Well, I am here to tell you that they don't! Perhaps it's better for the patient to have to worry about whether the stitches / staples will hold while struggling to reach the stockings to take them off / put them on, but, frankly, it's something I could have done without. I'm all for encouraging activity post-operatively, since that does aid recovery; however, physical contortion is not on my list of things that I want to do at the best of times; with several stitches in my abdomen and massive bruising, I really do not want to be fighting to reach my ankles!

I was lucky. I didn't get any infection post-operatively; the ward was cleaned, but all I will say on that score is that I dropped my toothbrush and an earring down the back of my (moveable) locker on the day I had surgery, and they were still there when I left five days later, requiring me to scrabble about to retrieve them, binning the former and cleaning the latter in surgical spirit before replacing it in my ear.

Nevertheless, I recovered and every day now is a bonus. This year, I'm counting the good things in my life - an optimistic turn of mind that I couldn't have predicted a year ago.