Oh my god, this hurts
Waking up to the realisation of major surgery
Some of this post is a bit gruesome and it also discusses (prescribed) opiate use. If that’s not your thing, here’s a fun cancer car game.
There must be something on my chest. Maybe a book shelf has fallen over and I’m stuck underneath it. Or maybe I was in a car crash and they forgot to tell me. That must be it. One of those ones where you get bounced over the bonnet. Like that one at the beginning of Meet Joe Black when Death needs a body, so hammers some guy with a yellow taxi. In short, oh my god, this hurts.
I’m writing this in the pitch black, in the middle of the night, about 16 hours after surgery to remove and reconstruct my breasts. I spent the first 10 hours repeatedly passing out from the drugs (once while actually on a bedpan. There was no pee in it, I couldn’t ‘go’ due to stage fright and I’d waited so long I’d drifted off.) and vomiting from the anaesthetic. The first time that I woke up feeling ok, I shovelled down some cold, congealed apple crumble (it was pretty much the best thing I’ve ever eaten) and went back to sleep.
When I woke up the next time, I’d been so deep asleep that I’d missed a dose of morphine. It’s a funny thing morphine. It’s strong, really strong, so you only get offered it if a bad (read: painful) thing has happened. But it’s so strong that it fools you into thinking you are coping. As it had worn off, I couldn’t lift my arms from my sides to reach my phone or even the call bell. I couldn’t stretch the 4 inches to the button that lifts up my bed. I was slowly trying to work some movements into my excruciating limbs when I realised I still really needed to pee.
I had no desire to wait until I could a. Reach the buzzer or b. The nurses came in two hours to give me my antibiotics. Even with the motivating power of a full bladder, it took about 10 minutes to shimmy my way up the bed without using my arms, stomach muscles, or shoulders. I found a way to shimmy my legs into a cross legged position under my bum and then painfully slowly, and painfully and slowly, press the button that raised the bed. It didn’t so much as sit me up as fold me over into a position that allowed me to slide down the bed. After untangling my drains (there are four bottles attached to my wounds, inside my chest, that drain…let’s call it fluid. They hang out of my sides) I shuffled to the loo.
I managed to shuffle my underwear down to pee but I couldn’t get the strength to flush the loo without seeing stars. Or get my knickers completely back up. I’m almost certain my bum was half covered. I was also having a genuine dilemma. I was making the drastic choice to leave the loo without flushing. Who are the people out there who aren’t flushing loos? Take a good, hard look at yourselves and make some changes.
It really hurt to breathe as every breath pushed my mangled chest into my surgical bra, but I made it down to the Nurses’ station. “Are you in pain, my love?” said the nurse. Because nothing says ‘please give me pain killers’ like someone shuffling down a hallway, carrying 4 bags of body fluid with their bum hanging out of the back of their nightie.
After some explanation that I did, in fact, know where the call button was but had also needed a toilet-based excursion, the nurse promised to sort me out with some painkillers.
I couldn’t manage to hook up my drains on either side of the bed so just left them by my toes and half fell, half climbed back into my bed.
After a few blessedly short minutes, the nurse came and uttered the immortal words “Love, I’ve got your morphine.”
Fast acting morphine comes in a syringe that you squirt into your mouth like when you give a baby calpol. Apparently people complain about the taste but I think it tastes like a warm gin cocktail (I’ve drunk worse) and if you’re at all bothered by the taste, trust me, you don’t need morphine.
I’m waiting for it to kick in now, or I can top up with tablet morphine or codeine, or your garden variety paracetamol/ibuprofen. It’s 3.30 am so I guess if I fall asleep it’s worked, if not, back to the buffet of pain relief.
Sent from my genericmobiledevice
I wrote that about 10 weeks ago and I’ve come a long way since. I’m not ‘fixed’ yet but I am getting there. The following morning, I fainted on my way back from the toilets, right as the nurses were changing shifts. I knew I was going to faint and slurrily begged them to let me just lie on the cold ward floor but they couldn’t (in case it was more serious and then they wouldn’t be able to get me back up without using my arms and damaging my surgical wounds) so I fainted into a nurse’s arms (very Gone With the Wind) and woke up next to my bed with both shifts looking down at me. They were hooking me up to an oxygen mask and arguing amongst themselves about which one of them had knocked my massive jug of water everywhere. They kept asking me if my head hurt while suspiciously saying “No reason, just asking…”. It turns out they’d bonked my head against the steel brace on the back of the chair (another patient had been watching the cabaret and told me after. Not much else to do) when they’d flopped me into it. I didn’t mind, I was unconscious.
So no more faints and I’m much better, but here’s a list of things that you wouldn’t expect to be quite genuinely impossible after a double mastectomy. At least during the first week or so:
Sitting up in bed (who knew this used your chest muscle?)
Lying back down in bed (you’re fundamentally in bed for this whole week)
Using a soap dispenser (wall mounted or sink ones, you just can’t ‘push’)
Pressing any button (including the ones on the side of your hospital bed that you are supposed to use to get up)
Pulling your trousers up (you can’t ‘pull’ either)
Doing your jeans up (you certainty can’t pull and turn your arms for jean-buttoning-up)
Sneezing (oh my god sneezing. So bad. I tried a contained-sneeze and a full blown Dad-sneeze. Both excruciating. Still not fun, nearly two months on)
Coughing (not as bad as you’d think)
Bumpy roads when you’re in a car
Missing a step in the pavement
Opening a heavy drawer
Shoving something into a drawer that’s already full but you’re sure you can stuff something extra in (the natural state of all my drawers)
Opening wine (screw cap or corkscrew, I checked)
Opening jars
Pushing tablets out of the pack (I know it’s getting pathetic)
Looking left too quickly
Looking right too quickly
Pulling a door handle down
Pushing a door open if there is no door handle
Weirdly, I could move almost perfectly fine. I could reach up and back and all sorts. As long as I didn’t have to move anything heavier than air. I had largely powered through chemo with a mix of distraction (largely provided by our resident tyrant/daughter), luck and very supportive family and friends, but there was going to be no ‘powering through’ for surgery. These weren’t side effects. These were wounds and scars and things that had been broken before being fixed. It was going to take time.
If this post seems like a bit of a pity party, don’t worry, I was fine. I was discharged after two nights in hospital, where I was cared for by yet another amazing set of nurses, and then looked after by my excellent husband, and assorted members of my family popping round each week. So, thanks team. You’re ace.
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