Hospital Hangover

Yesterday, M had surgery and the doctor put a plate in his radius, held in with 7 screws. Surgery which looked almost exactly, in fact, like this. Which I found on Monday and which helped, I hope, get M through the whole thing.

Surgery is rough. I have never had it - I had two kids natural childbirth, in and out of the hospital - and until yesterday I had no familiarity with any of this pre-op, recovery, post-op, IVs, & etc type stuff. I wish I still didn't. Part of me is wildly second guessing the whole thing, but it's too late now. Poor M is still in a lot of pain, still groggy - it's been more than 24 hours and he's still feeling really rough.

I was going to blog the whole thing, minute by minute, from the tropical fish in the waiting room, to the scariness of the recovery room, to the wearisome waiting, waiting, waiting, to the white bread and american processed pasteurized cheese food of the cafeteria but I don't think I have the energy. It was an ordeal in the truest sense of the word. I was naive going in; I got my ideas from TV; I thought M would wake up from anesthesia and we would joke and share a pizza and I would go home, leaving him briefly in the loving, attentive care of kind and beautiful nurses. It took him hours to wake up and when he did he was in terrible pain and very sick and I was horrified. The nurses were kind but distant and overworked; I held his head when he threw up at 3 am; I followed him in and out of the bathroom with the IV. I "slept" all night on a cranky "reclining" chair that kept trying to swallow me; it was cold and the pillow was slippery plastic underneath its cotton case. All the sheets were stamped Industrial Laundry in big blue letters and small lights flickered, things beeped, and when you called the nurse it took her 10 minutes or more to come.

I thought a lot about how lucky I am to have reached age 42 with two kids and no familiarity with hospital routines; I thought about what it must be like to bring a child into the hospital again and again, to stay there for days, to shiver every day at 4 am under the thin cotton blanket on the vinyl chair. I need to stop bitching - things are not so bad in my life.

It's going to be a long slow road for M to recovery - the doctor doesn't think he should go to camp; he'll be 3 weeks with this splint & huge foam sling, then into a cast, but he will have to be careful all the time. His hand is all swollen and he feels like hell. It's awful and they gave me hydrocodone to give him, which scares me, but his pain is worse. And me? I feel like I have a hangover, even though I haven't had a drop to drink. God what a loathesome couple of days.