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and last updated February 19th., 2002.
WELCOME TO MY DAY..
IT IS NICE TO HAVE YOU SHARE IT WITH ME...
Well, what a difference a few short weeks can make..
Last time of writing here, I bemoaned the fact that I had nothing new happening in my life..a life centred totally on the expansion of our business...a life which had somehow begun to condense to the "work, eat, sleep" formula!
A life can change totally between December and February.
I should know.
We had our Xmas breakup....
and the usual staff birthday parties..
But as December progressed through Christmas, the workload sure didn't get any lighter...I was working such long hours, and doing a lot of "builder's labourer" type chores after hours, and feeling tireder and tireder, even resting most of each weekend not seeming to help much.
I told the husband I needed some time off and he kept saying "When this is all finished..."
And I was in a lot of pain, from the old disk problem I supposed, aggravated, I figured, by all the lifting, heaving, pushing, and carrying I'd been doing....so I was popping a NSAID every day. Sometimes the hundred yard walk from shop to carpark, carrying heavy bags, was a mountain...
And still feeling worse and worse, even though things were finally falling into place once the builders came back to work. The roof still leaked but at last we had carpet on the floor of the new shop and we built shelves after hours and at weekends and stocked them, and took the books out of the waiting area and people could sit down again...
And then we moved the playpen and set it up for business..but the roof was still leaking , which spoiled things a bit..
But then the husband decided to put in a new Dispensary software system on January 23rd, before we had finished everything else... and that was the biggest "Aaaaggh" of all, because that slowed down the dispensing so much, and I had to help him more, as well as do the "new shop" things, and I had begun to realise I was just not coping with all this extra work, not coping well at all...
As usual I went to bed after work on Saturday 24th., even though we had granddaughter Astra staying, and on Sunday 25th, right in the middle of the Australia Day holiday weekend here, I woke very, very sick indeed, and in so much pain that I, a determined agnostic, found myself actually praying for it to go away.I couldn't walk, couldn't shower, could think of nothing but the pain...I had a temperature around 105 and soon the rigors set in quite spectacularly..
Now, had my son and daughter in law not been staying in the house, I suspect I would not be writing this, because SHE went to wake HIM when the the husband told her there was "something wrong with Robin but nothing serious" and HE persuaded my husband this was not just what's going around, and that we WOULD get an an ambulance , even on a holiday weekend....
And so I arrived at the ER unshowered, my hair needing a trim and a mess, and with a suitcase, not the one I had asked for of course, filled with clothes and toiletries assembled desperately by my two men to my prone directions (and that was a saga in itself!!!...Why CAN"T a man work out which lipstick is the pale pink one?)
As it happened, Geelong Hospital had just set up a new Triage procedure,via which a succession of impossibly young medical staff rather quickly elevated me from level 4 to level 2, and Dr G, the Surgical Registrar on duty was within 5 days of being made a "Mr" and knew his stuff. I had blood tests and a trip to XRay, where, it seemed, they'd had several cases just like mine, and I answered a lot of questions, but didn't, at that time, realise how sick I was, though I suppose the penny should have dropped when the family, grandchildren and all, began to arrive and hover in and around the cubicle..
Anyway, the nice Registrar asked me what was wrong with me, and when I told him I thought it was probably diverticulitis, like my mother had, he was quite terse and told me to leave the diagnosis to him,and then he told me of several more things he thought the problem might be, including cancer, of course,since there is a family history of that, too, and then he said he felt Professor W was the man to call since he had worked in Africa and New Guinea and had a lot of experience operating under less than ideal conditions, which this was going to be..
And when Professor W checked me and the XRays over, and had talked to the Registrar a while, he told me I needed immediate surgery, that the blood tests revealed an infection , that there was definite peritonitis, that it was almost certain I would need a large section of my bowel removed, and that there was probably too much damage for a resection to be performed safely, and I would need a colostomy and some time in Intensive Care..
Well, I wasn't too sure, but if by operating they would take the pain away, I guess I would have signed anything at that point.
But then they started worrying about where to get a bed quickly, at which point the son convinced his father it was OK to say we had full Private Health cover,and told them so himself, which meant a few strings could be cut, and the Prof. had me admitted as his Private Patient, and things moved rather rapidly after that..I was hooked up to I.V's and divested of my clothes and given forms to sign, and the Anaesthetic Registrar visited, to advise me they would need to use the lightest possible anaesthesia, so that I might well be "aware some of the time" during the surgery, but that they would make sure I would not be able to FEEL anything; the family were sent home to wait for the Professor to call them, and by 6pm I was on my way, stomach marked with "CUT HERE" texta directions, to the next section of my life.
Not fast enough for my veins though.
And I wasn't to know, of course, until later , that there had been three other "bowel emergencies" in ER all at once, and that the operating team worked all night, that the story had spread around the hospital, and that I had achieved fame of a kind.
They said the usual things said at such times..that it had "gone well", had , in fact, been their "best-case scenario"...
I still had the breathing tubes down my throat for some hours, so all communication with the ICU staff had to be by whiteboard, but I was pleased to see I COULD write , and that my faculties seemed reasonably intact. Encouraged to investigate my abdomen , I located the stoma at once, rather higher than I had expected, and marvelled at the long, long line of silver staples.
"What have you done with my NAVEL?" I whiteboarded, for I just didn't have one any more, the silver railroad now advancing steadily through where it had been all my life.
Humour after major surgery?
And that, of course, is the next episode...
But noone seemed inclined to give me anything for the PAIN!!!!
Well, my father had a colostomy back in the 80s, so I knew about stomas, and I told Professor W of my horror of having to live with one.
He looked at me , almost amused, and asked quietly,
"Would you rather be alive in two weeks with a colostomy, or dead in two hours without one?"
By the time we reached Theatre, all my veins had collapsed, and I was able to watch, almost carelessly, as first a junior Anaesthetic Resident, then subsequent, more senior operators tried to get lines into me for antibiotics and fluids so the operation could start.
And still wide awake I was quite aware of a kind of panic..until the Anesthetist herself came out , a little displeased I thought, and cut down into my neck and started pushing things in there. Nor was she pleased to hear my front teeth are crowned, since, apparently. loose crowns have a habit of dislodging during intubation or resuscitation and creating havoc when inhaled. And I still have a pink patch on my neck where her scalpel slipped, apparently, and sliced off a large section of skin at the base of my throat.
Her exasperated mopping, to try to stop the bleeding, I guess, is one of the last things I remember.
I'd been lucky enough to be the first procedure, or ' first cab off the rank" as a nurse later described it, but when they woke me in ICU at 6am on Monday, Australia Day, both Professor W and Dr G were there, one each side of the bed, seeming so elated, so GLAD to see me awake, I didn't realise that they hadn't yet been home..or that there were four of us had survived thus far..
Oh, and that I had been quite correct in my diagnosis, only things had been going on rather longer than I'd realised.
Yes, ruptured diverticula had been the problem..but the rupture had occured some time back ,weeks, probably, and had been vainly trying to heal, and that all the while I had been doing the carrying and lifting, the pushing and moving, I had been doing so with a leaking bowel..culminating in what the Professor referred to as
"gallopping peritonitis".
And that the colostomy would be reversible in three to six months.
Well, I know now that while they have you "under" in ICU they pump you so full of so much stuff that you feel better, when you first wake, than you are going to feel for a long, long time.
Love to everyone ,and everyone on our side!
-from
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