"Welcome to Adulthood"

Day four. I was told yesterday morning (Thursday) that I could "possibly be discharged by the end of the day!" Enter an excruciating seven hour iron drip. Fast forward and here I am still in the hospital on Friday night.

Yesterday was tough. Wednesday night was the first night I spent alone in the hospital. I slept really well which should have been a good thing, but ended up being a huge mistake. Wednesday I was doing so well that they took me off my IV fluids and PCA (Patient Controlled Analgesia - which is a fancy way of saying button that I push to jack me up with instant pain relief) and switched me to oral painkillers. I took my dose at 9:30ish before I went to sleep Wednesday night and slept all the way through to 2:00 AM Thursday morning when I woke up because I have been peeing like a racehorse while I've been here. When I woke up to go to the bathroom, I didn't have any pain so I thought, "wonderful, I can just go back to bed." I woke up again at 5:00 to go to the bathroom and thought I was going to die. I hate to sound dramatic, but I have honestly not been in too much pain for this entire process but in that moment it felt like my muscles were shredding themselves with every move I made. I obviously got some percocet ASAP (I'm supposed to take some every four hours and had gone nearly eight without any) and tried to get back to sleep. Pain is rated on a scale of 1 to 10 here and over the next hour and a half I waited for my meds to kick in slowly realizing that it was just getting worse and worse (moving from a 9 to a 10 where 10 is the worst pain you've ever felt in your life). The morning check-ups usually start around 6:00 anyway so I wasn't able to get back to sleep since I had to keep rolling over to show my incision, get blood pressure taken, get shots, etc. this whole time. I finally dozed off around 6:45 and woke up sometime at 7:30 in a lot less pain (still close to a 6 or 7 which they still don't want me to feel). I made it through but definitely learned my lesson.

Later that day they got back some lab results and saw that I was extremely anemic (my iron levels should be at 20% and they were at 5%) so I would have to go on an iron drip. This was supposed to take around four hours and ended up taking seven. They had to slow it down part-way through because I was having pain at the injection site and the whole thing just wiped me out. I slept most of the day, so I think it was truly harder on Bobby and my mom watching me feel so exhausted when the day before I had been so energetic. Meanwhile my urine was getting progressively darker (due to not being on fluids and the addition of iron); at one point it was tea-colored and I could tell it really freaked Bobby out. They took more blood and ordered a urine culture just to make sure and everything came back fine. All in all, Thursday was exhausting and hard on all of us.

Friday was much more simple and can be described with one word: waiting. I woke up feeling better. I was definitely woozy from my drugs, but I woke up to take them in the middle of the night so my pain was under control. I was pretty much guaranteed that I was going to be discharged as long as I met "one final threshold." I had to break wind. Seems simple enough. I'd been on solid foods a full day and wasn't experiencing any nausea, plus the iron drip was supposed to cause diarrhea. Done and done. Except not. Every time I got close to food, I felt gross. My body was saying "feed me, I'm hungry," but my stomach was saying "sorry no room down here." Throughout the morning my bowels literally bloated up and my stomach distended. Any pain I had was due more to my backed-up tracts than the surgical incision. Lunch came, same issues. By 2:00 PM when they do afternoon rounds, it looked like I was not going home since I wasn't getting any closer to my "goal." Once that was determined, they thought they'd try and speed things along with.....wait for it....a suppository. Is it bad that my initial reaction was to run over to Jim and say, "I'll gladly give you my kidney but I did NOT sign up for this!" ? So with that wonderful news my doctor left and said "welcome to adulthood" whatever that means.

So here's the summary: suppository wasn't as bad as I thought. Kicked in much faster than the nurse thought. I finally met my threshold and should be good to go tomorrow. It would still be nice to get some solids out, but I'll take the baby steps for now.