But there was a stumble on the dismount.
According to the surgeon, the hand operation was a roaring success; a perfect 10. He took out the arthritic bone that was causing the problem, harvested a tendon to loop through the base of the thumb bone and attach to the hand. Problem solved. He talked to me, said to see him again in two weeks, finished his day, and went home.
The recovery time stretched on and on. From its original estimate of 45 minutes, it dragged on for several hours, with them periodically explaining that they just needed a little more time to get her stabilized so they could move her to recovery, stage two, where I could go back with her. I waited in the waiting room. Patiently. Until it was clear something was up that shouldn’t be up. Up until then they thought they had a rule that visitors weren’t allowed back to the area where Judy was recovering, but it turns out they were wrong, and I got to spend the rest of the time with my wife in recovery, stage one.
When they did the surgery, they didn’t put her under general anesthetic; they just sedated her lightly to minimize recovery time, and gave a block to her arm so she wouldn’t feel anything. Nothing unusual; this is just how to do an operation like this. For the block, the anesthesiologist locates a bundle of nerves in the shoulder with ultrasound, and injects anesthetic around the nerves that control the arm, to put the nerves out for a few hours. They discovered during recovery that they not only blocked her arm, they blocked a nerve for her right lung. When she was waking up and recovering, she wasn’t very alert and wasn’t holding oxygen very well. It took a long time for her lung to wake up and stabilize. By that time it was getting late and she hadn’t been stable for very long, so they admitted her overnight for observation.
Maybe we needed a reminder of how old we are. The nice young nurse checking us in was asking questions and filling out forms. Some of the answers had already been filled in and she was just confirming them. When she got to the drug allergies section, she read the answers and asked out loud, “What is ehther”, totally mispronouncing ether.
“Ether.” “You know, the thing you inhale and it puts you out.” “The anesthetic they give (gave) you to take out your tonsils.”
Ether has been gone so long she had never heard of it. She’s a registered nurse, and she had never heard of ether!
But I digress. Back to the story at hand. We passed an uneventful night kind of sleeping in a hospital room. I got the comfortable chair.
Judy got the comfortable bed.
The doctor gave us the all clear at 6am, and multiple tedious hours after that (It always seems so easy to get into the hospital, and so much harder to get back out!), we finally got the I.V. out of Judy’s arm and made the three hour drive to pick up Henry, get some prescriptions filled, and go home.
Now Judy has a splint on her arm and drugs in her system.
And meals that normally would look like this.
Get delivered to Judy looking like this, so she can eat them one-handed .
No comments:
Post a Comment