I'm Back!

First of all I want to thank everyone for the wonderful comments, thoughts, prayers and help you have all given us during this adventure.  I am feeling stronger everyday.  I’m not pain free but I get a brief respite a few hours each day.  Best of all the constant numbness and tingling in left arm and leg are gone…Take that Chiari!

Wow, where to start?  I guess I’ll start with the fact that I never got the chance to cruise the hallways of the hospital in a wheelchair harassing people…bummer.  As a matter of fact I got reprimanded for going past the double doors of my wing one day during a walk.  Apparently there are a lot of confused people on the neuroscience unit and they don’t want them getting lost.

The big day was finally here, we left the house at 4:00am so we could see my parents before the 5:30am check-in.  Shockingly enough check-in started with having to take a freakin’ number and sit and wait to be called.  We waited then signed our lives away and off we went to pre-op care, where they were nice enough to run some happy juice through my IV then covered me in pre-warmed blankets, I loved those blankets.  Things get blurry after that, I remember rolling through the halls and praying they didn’t break my feet since the stretcher isn’t made for people as tall as I am and my feet were hanging over the edge.  I remember how the OR looked brand new…if it was 1970.  To be fair they are constructing a dedicated OR tower so future patients will get to use the new digs.  They asked me what kind of music I wanted to listen too, so I asked for something fast, hard, and loud.  The last thing I remember is hearing Thunderstruck by AC/DC and then waking up in the ICU and being moved to the PACU, or maybe I woke up in the PACU and then moved to the ICU.  I have no idea where I was Friday into Saturday morning, just that it was on the 5th floor of the D wing and there were at least 3 others in there with me and they kept the room wonderfully dark.  One of my room mates was a teenager I’ll call him “Skippy”.  Skippy needed his ass kicked, all he did was yell at the nurses and his mommy, then mommy would yell at the nurses.  I offered up a “shut-up” as loud as I could but it didn’t work, for all I know the words never came out.  The only thing that I remember clearly was managing to rip out one of my IV’s and being completely covered in blood.  The rest of Friday sucked.  They tried to sit me up using the adjustable bed but the pain was too much to stand so they laid me back down.  Later they tried to sit me up using an assistant at each side…bad move; the pain was brutal and my legs and arms convulsed involuntarily.  That must have been one hell of a site; all 6’4” of me waving about like a jellyfish.  TMI ALERT…I know you are all wondering why they kept torturing me by making me sit up, the simple answer is that my catheter was out and I wanted to prove I could go by myself.  The stakes were high because if I didn’t go they would straight catheter me every time I had a full bladder…yup, I lost that battle.  It taught me one valuable lesson though, and that is that you don’t give a damn about dignity when your bladder is full and you can’t complete the mission on your own.  The rest of my night was filled with nausea and my vitals being checked every hour, sleep just wasn’t meant to be.

Stay tuned I have more to share but I need to rest.  With luck I’ll have another installment tomorrow.