Wednesday, April 30, 2008

now with drug links!

Daniel cried when I picked him up last night. CRIED. The little ingrate, so I took him to one store to buy some Real Deal Thomas train tracks, and then took him upstairs to another store to buy him the Gordon Plus Carriage Plus some disaster making accouterments that go along with the Gordon Play Along set, (also with free DVD!)(with literally my last forty dollars for THE ENTIRE WEEK)(and my GOD, I cannot believe the changes that have been made to child support assessments. I'll be over 160 bucks DOWN each month, never mind that I now have to pay water rates [ which, who in the hell rents and pays water rates? hint: NO ONE] and the cost of living is KNOWN to be getting out of hand even for COUPLES who BOTH WORK. I'm fucked, seriously, and Strep is all jumping for joy because - and get this - while my child support goes down, he not only saves that extra 160 bucks, he just got a SUBSTANTIAL payrise, one that makes that 160 bucks barely out a dent in his salary) and now that I've bribed him for my love, he's watching the same old Thomas shit on TV that I usually let him watch when I'm feeling guilty about being a crapass parent, exceot now with Train Tracks! On the floor! While carrying Gordon (plus carriage!) back and forward between by my side (for providing narration) and in front of the tv (for providing material for narration). No wonder he cried when he left YB's because he had a whole family to have fun with there: the pretend older brother, the make believe father, and the proxy mother who I BET never jams on a dvd so she can complain to the internet about her child's supreme stay with another family.

Others might say that I'm buying myself some time out following a harrowing operation, but I OBVIOUSLY, I prefer to think that I suck.

ANYWAY, I'm doing okay. Swollen up like the elephant man on one side, and swollen around my ear so much that I'm partially deaf, all of which is to be expected. This should be the worst day with the swelling going down pretty steadily from here on in. I know this because I've done it FOUR times already. Jesus. You know what though? The biggest shitter of this whole deal has actually been the LIMITED amount of pain I've been in. FOR SERIOUS.

Let me explain: Maybe you all remember my surgeon hates narcotic pain relief? He'll allow you a teeny tiny dose of Pethidine in recovery and THAT'S IT. No kidding. Once that very short float on a cloud is over, it's just you and the Paracetamol. So for my first operation, the one that *warning, ick alert* involved my FACE being sawed through in AT LEAST seven places and moved and drilled and even bits of it removed? It hurt big time for FIVE DAYS, and all I had was Panadol. Fucking Panadol. Except that one time Nurse Ratchet, the night relief nurse, emptied the contents of a Capadex into a cup and made me drink it. I was all, uh, it's in a capsule for a REASON ie IT TASTES LIKE SHIT, and she as good as held my head and poured it down my throat. So I suffered, SUFFERED, through that and then threw it all back up again, which made my pain level at least TRIPLE, but by then I couldn't even have any panadol because I'd ben force fed the capadex, so had to wait at least another four hours for some more panadol which didn't work anyway.

Oh, and there was that other time when, on day 2 or thereabouts I had this massive migraine ON TOP of all my Giant Floating Head pain, and the on call doctor wrote me a stat script for Oxycodone and can I just say? LOVE. Also, no shit it's a drug "subject to abuse". It's fucking AWESOME. What I loved most about it was that the nurse made a mistake on the stat (ie once only) script and threw me back up to heaven again four hours later. Wooo!

And then my second and third operations were repeat of the first miserable one, vis a vis available pain control. ie THERE WAS NONE.

This time though, THIS TIME, when my pain scale was NEGLIGIBLE, another doctor, my anaethawhatever, wrote up the post op meds and he wrote up a whole lot of Fentanyl to be sued as needed while in recovery, and for four hourly doses of pethidine as needed for when I was back on the ward. People, that translates to twenty four hours of Pethidine, or in real terms, a FULL DAY, CONSTANT HIGH. Except that I didn't need it because I wasn't in any real pain.

RIPPED OFF.

I did, however, take full advantage of the Fentanyl and whenever anyone asked me what my pain was like, I groaned a believable "Seven. Or maybe an eight", because, Jesus, I'd only just come out of surgery, give me a BREAK here. Fentanyl doesn't whack my brain right out of my head though, so because the side of my mouth was kind of sore after all that Fentanyl wore off, and because my only other pain relief option was that fucking panadol, I made sure I got hit up with one dose of Pethadine before I lost even that excuse for a slice of the drug fest that was on offer.

This time too, with only ONE night to stay there, the nurses were FABULOUS, which was in stark contrast to the uber bitches who used to work that ward. This time around they called me sweetie and NOTHING was too much. The last time? God, even asking for PANADOL was a burden for them which, isn't that their fucking JOB? And it was like that for FIVE days. GAH. The afternoon nurse asked me if I needed more Pethidine ("no" *sobs*), as did the night nurse (*more sobbing*) , and even the nurse who was back on yesterday morning (I begged her to his me in the face so I COULD partake). They CARED, and yet fate gave them to me for only one day.

Where is the humanity?!

But! It's refreshing to know then, that after experiencing The Nice, it isn't my paranoia making me believe that the nurses hated me last time (which is what I'd convinced myself because I'm all about blaming myself for less that stellar interactions)(I suck that way, honestly), they really DID hate me, and probably every other patient that interfered with their work. which is really quite the circular argument because patients ARE their work.

ANYWAY, the prof said that while the plates were all AOK, there was a LOT of scarring around them - which hopefully it won't come back as badly this time - which may have been responsible for the excessive numbness. He also took a fat graft (sex-ay!) from NOT my c-section scar, so I have a pretty new scar just under my belly button, which I prefer, actually, as my c-section has faded to rather invisible these days and I'd rather not fuck with that amount of Not Noticeable. I'd rather have a new scar than have had my c-section one become more noticeable because c-section scars = SO NOT SEXY

So that's my news: possibly no fuck ups this time around, and the prof has been very congenial and not at all arrogant (well, okay, maybe a bit) like he has been in the past, the aneasthahowever you spell it wrote me up GOBS of good drugs which, while I couldn't use them, made me love him a LOT.

and I got no sleep last night and feel like crap today, and it's the drugs and the experience and the tiredness but god, I'm depressed. The end.




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