Not a good patient

Well, the surgery was a success and my precautions against Fate seem to have paid off. Now recovering day by day and the only ‘medicine’ I’m taking is an Extra Strong Mint every now and then. Why, oh why, don’t they tell you beforehand that when you wake up you will have been inflated with so much air that you’ll feel like you’re being crushed from the inside? There is no pain at all from the incisions. They’re a little bit tender and I know I’m cut, but there’s no searing pain as there would be from open surgery. By my standards, the incisions are not painful. My skin is aware of them and keeps warning me to be careful, but I think when they feel pulled it’s actually the dressings pulling the wounded skin, and not the incisions themselves. Good, good – small, painless and easy to look after. The anaesthetist, possibly the gentlest man I ever encountered, implanted some slow release local anaesthetic to get over the really raw spell, and it has worked a treat. Big thank you to him and I hope he’s sorted his daughter’s iPad out. Was it to distract me while he put the cannula in that he asked my technical advice, or was it just while he had someone technical at his mercy? I laughed, whichever, and the cannula didn’t hurt for more than a few seconds.

The gas pain though. Now that has been excruciating. Just when I think it might be safe to move, it bubbles up to my shoulders and I feel like both of my collar bones are in a vice. It’s a bit like being winded, if you’ve ever had that joyful experience. I wasn’t aware that this was to come. When I came to, there wasn’t a twinge. When I sat up though, I thought my lungs had collapsed! Couldn’t take a deep enough breath to stop my body panicking, couldn’t move, certainly couldn’t lift an arm and could barely speak to ask what the hell was going on. Trapped wind, I feel, is something of an understatement. I was a balloon, and an over-filled one at that.

It’s still quite painful, but nothing like what it was on Wednesday morning. I still can’t yawn – there’s just not enough room for my ribs to expand – and forget leaning over. If I were the type that could easily set air in the gut free, I might be striding around (in as much as I ever do) again already. But I’m not. A huge belch is what I need really, but it just doesn’t happen for me. My biggest burps are quite understated rumbles on the sub-sonic level. They don’t release much volume. Maybe I spent so many years being made to be ladylike that when I really need my gut to behave like no-one’s listening, it just can’t remember how. Peppermints seem to help disperse it back throughout the area, but they don’t show it the way out. It’s not fun, but it is gradually reducing and I’m just as gradually returning to the size I was when I set out for the hospital. You’d think I’d gained twice the weight I lost in the run up to the op. No danger of that yet either - haven’t got room to eat more than a slice or two of toast. I’m hungry. I’d love to sit down to a nice meal. Still, not going to happen for a while yet.

Apparently I was lucky. We’d suspected there would be some scarring just because of the length of time (about a decade) and the amount of pain, and lo there was quite a bit. The surgeon, being experienced and skilled, was able to manoeuvre and still complete the procedure laparoscopically – no need to convert to open surgery – and for that I am most grateful. I have four little vampire bites but no additional zip. So thank you, sir, nice neat job well done.

I’m also really grateful to the nursing staff that kept an eye on me in the Surgery Centre. I must have sounded like a really grumpy stand-up comic when I came to. My blood pressure was low, and my temperature was low, and I kept saying but that’s normal for me. Just let me sleep and warm up and it will stabilise, but they kept coming back and waking me up to take another reading. Every time they came back I said, look, I know you have to do this but it really is normal and all I need is sleep then I’ll be fine, but you won’t let me sleep, so it’s never going to look good. I was like a broken record and I feel quite bad that I was getting so annoyed. Really. All I wanted, all I needed, was to sleep off the body shock and the borderline dangerous would have become low side of normal. My pressure is always low. I have to raise my legs to have blood tests done. If I’m warm, it’s better, but my nervous system can’t regulate my temperature properly and I was only just warm enough in my little room there. Of course, if they’d turned the heating up, I would probably have fainted, so either way I’d have been a concern. I’m used to how my system works, and it is a bit wonky, a learning curve, but there’s nothing (seriously) wrong with my mind. It gets very frustrating when you know what’s going to work and you have no control. So I’m sorry, nurses, you were all fantastic and look – I’m ok and my pressure is still low. Now about how long do you reckon this balloon syndrome will last?

Really, in all honesty, I couldn’t have asked for better and the same after-symptoms would have happened no matter where I went. But would it all have gone so smoothly and would I have left smiling if I’d gone anywhere else? You can slam the NHS all you want, but I’ll throw right back at you reason after reason why it’s great and why you should trust your life to the brilliant people that make it what it is. I couldn’t do what they do, but I’m very glad they can.