The Hole Within

CHAPTER 66

The next thing I became aware of was the doctor waking me up in the operating room. I was confused and groggy. "I want you to take a breath," said the doctor as he watched, making sure I could breathe on my own without the ventilator. Satisfied, he deftly removed the breathing tube from my throat. The sudden movement of the foreign body made me cough and I was racked with an intense sharp pain. I then woke again in excruciating pain. I was in the recovery room. I could not even pinpoint the source of the pain it was so great. "Hurt," I croaked again and again as tears spilled down my face. The nurse gave me an injection in my IV which was supposed to help but the pain did not relent. It was like taking a baby aspirin for a migraine. So consumed was I with pain that if asked I could not tell where I was or what had happened to me. I lay sobbing and moaning and the nurse gave me another dose. 

I did not feel like I was connected to my body. I was a head connected to white hot pain. Apparently, I was crying out for my mommy and they brought her back. She cried silently standing next to my bed and stroked my sweaty forehead. I do not know how many doses they gave me of the pain medication before they stopped. I do not know that my mom left and Mel appeared. I also remember one of them desperately asking if the nurse could not give me something more for the pain. "I've given her enough morphine for a three-hundred-pound person, I can't give her anymore," she replied. Soon, it seemed, I was alone in the room. I cried out, I moaned, I sobbed. At some point in the night a nurse came to me and told me I needed to calm down. I needed to get control of myself. I was keeping the other patients awake. I had not even realized that I was being so vocal. I made an effort to calm myself and not cry out.

Eventually, I was transferred to the med-surg floor. The pain medication started to do its job and made it tolerable though it did not take it completely away. I tried to sleep as much as I could as that was my only relief. Mel was there when I woke and fed me ice chips. I was not able to move around much since I had two chest tubes in. The tubes were about the circumference of a large Sharpie. They went into the side of my chest just below the line of my left breast. One was to keep my lung inflated and the other was to drain blood and fluid. When I had to move, the tubes would pull and it would send a shock of pain through my chest. The doctor came in to check my bandage. I sat up, filled with pain, as he undid my gown to expose my back. He carefully removed the heavy bloodied bandages and Mel recoiled at the site. Once he changed the soiled bandage he listened to my lungs and left the room. I asked Mel to describe the incision to me. She was unnaturally speechless, her eyes full of tears. Finally, finding her voice, she told me that the incision went from the middle of my scapula down my back and around my left side in line with the underside of my left breast. She said that she had no idea it would be that big. It was held together by dozens of staples. She told me it looked like something out of Frankenstein, as she cried.

I came to hate the respiratory therapists that visited me every two hours. They gave me breathing treatments, medicine that vaporized in a cylinder and I inhaled. Then would come the hated incentive spirometer. It was a plastic contraption with an end to suck on and a little blue ball in a graduated cylinder which would raise up with each inhalation. The respiratory therapists would encourage me to suck harder and harder, to make the little ball rise up to the first black line. It was hard painful work and it took days to get the ball high enough to satisfy them. If I was sleeping when they came in they would wake me. I would complain at them and ask them to come back later to no avail.

On the third day, the doctor came in and said he would be removing my chest tubes. He clipped the stitches holding them in and told me to take a deep breath and force it out again. On the exhale, he quickly ripped them out of my body. I felt as if someone had stuck a knife in me. With the chest tubes gone the pain I had been feeling was more manageable. Soon I was weaned to intramuscular injections instead of intravenous. Then the nurses began to encourage me to take Percocet instead of having the injections. I finally relented and took two Percocets thirty minutes before lunch. I complained to them that I had to eat with the pills or I would get sick. They told me that lunch would come soon and they gave me the pills. By the time the lunch came I was nauseous. Mel was there and ready with a basin if I had to throw up. Despite the nausea, I powered through and ate only to reach for the basin and vomit everything up. Mel emptied it in the toilet and flushed it away. She called for the nurse as I was really hurting. The nurse came in and told Mel told her what had happened. The nurse asked Mel where the vomit was. She told us that she could not give me anything more because she could not see the pills I had vomited up. I would have to wait three and a half hours for my next dose. Un-medicated, the pain was sharp and intense. I suffered through each agonizing hour, counting down the time. When the nurse finally came back in I was sweating and trembling from the pain. I wanted the IM injection as dinner was an hour away but she insisted on giving me the pills. I took them with dread and within twenty minutes I threw them back up into the waiting basin that Mel held for me. She called in the nurse again and showed her the two half-melted pills in the vomit. I got my IM injection with relief. The doctor ordered an antiemetic to be taken thirty minutes before the pain pills and I was able to tolerate that. On the sixth day, I was released to go back home. The first thing I wanted to do was go look at my incision in the bathroom. It looked like I had a zipper running down the left side of my back. I was stunned to see how long the incision was. I dreaded the scar it would make as Mel had always loved my body.

They had placed a new central line before I left the hospital. It was I was to start the chemo the week after I got home. Mel told me that the surgeon had told her it was a good thing they had removed the upper left lobe of my lung. He said it was purulent and sloughed off as he cut it out. The lobe was completely diseased. I felt new hope now that it was out of me.