ThinnerTimes - Gastric Bypass and Lap Band® Forum - View Single Post

rodnunley · 03-24-2006, 01:58 PM

By this point everyone knows most of the gory details of my Gastric Bypass Surgery and the major effect it had on my life over the last 4 months. So I will choose now to not go over all that again.

I will tell you two important facts though. First I will tell you that I left very early Friday morning to go to my friend Bob’s wedding this last Friday in Big Bend National Park. Then I will tell you that Big Bend National Park is about an 8 to 9 hour drive (depending greatly on how close the pedal is to the floor) from my hometown of Austin, TX.

And trust me when I tell you the second piece of information will be important later on in our story.

So away I went early Friday morning in a rental car with friends Dan and Rachael along for the trip. The car loaded with tents and food and sleeping bags galore. Ready for a weekend of roasting hotdogs and campfire stories and beautiful wedding in the mountains with the bears and the mountain lions and family and friends.

We arrived early (by our estimation) and had a pretty pleasant drive. Set up our tents in record time and then preceded to mock those others who were attempting to set up their tents. I was not even deterred in my sarcasm by the fact that Dan had to show me how to assemble my tent. Than had been a whole ten minutes ago and now forgotten.

We sat for dinner and I had a few chips…all was going well.

Then the pain began. Sharp pain that lived in my abdomen. Not stomach pain (as I was pretty familiar with that at this point in post surgery) but lower than that and constant.

I should tell you at this point that this was not the first time I had felt this pain. I had gone to the ER the weekend before with the exact same problem and after a cat scan and some blood work I had been told that I was dehydrated. After three bags of IV fluid I was sent home feeling fine. I was pretty sure this was happening again.

But I know I was getting a ton of water. At that point already 50 ounces and it’s was not even the end of the day.

So I went and saw the park ranger (also an EMT) and after my vitals were taken was told that I could stick it out or be taken to the nearest hospital. It happened to be 110 miles away in Alpine, TX.

I decided to stick it out and crashed in a lodge room with a friend. I slept maybe two hours the whole night. I drank water and writhed around in the dark all night trying to find any position that would hurt just a little less.

I waited for daylight and called the Park Ranger once again to see about getting some IV fluid…somehow still convinced that I was just dehydrated. They were not willing to do that so I got myself dressed and drove myself the 110 miles to the nearest hospital. I will only say this about that trip. It is surprising the speeds you will go when you don’t care about getting a ticket. Really surprising.

When I arrived I was introduced to modern medicine’s most ingenious invention. It’s called The Pain Scale and it works like this. You have pain ranging on a scale from 1 to 10. Ten being the most pain imaginable and one being the least. And to help clarify this every hospital known to man has a diagram with smiley faces to match the corresponding number on the chart.

It’s like they want you to look at this chart and figure out (while in your haze of pain) what your face would look like if it were in stick figure form. I really think it’s some sort of additional sociological test they put you through without telling you.

I picked number 4 on this magical pain chart when I got to the hospital. Not to high to make them think I was some sort of wussy and not so low that I really shouldn’t even be there. I mean really…. who goes to the ER when they are feeling a 1 on the pain scale?

“Yeah doc, I think this splinter is pretty serious. Pain chart…oh …maybe a one.”

So the first thing we did was some x-rays and some blood work.

A not so little sidebar about the world of drawing blood:

I am now positive that the people who draw your blood at hospitals are always the last person you yourself would choose to do so if given any choice at all. And I am including the janitorial staff here as well as the gift shop girls.

They are always new techs whose mission is to probe every inch of your arm for any sigh of a vein…and then go anywhere but that location to try and draw blood. I swear to you that if it weren’t for the fact that it’s my arm they are doing needlework on that I would seriously feel bad for them. They always come across like a pothead trying to play a complicated Jimmie Page riff on guitar, “Wait, wait, oh sorry. Hold on, wait…I got it…nope, damn…wait a sec…there it…ah, nope…hang on a sec... wait….”

And on and on until you are confident you can connect the dots to form an accurate picture of The Battle of Andersonville on your arm. It’s only at that point that they look up at you and speak with a small and ashamed voice, “I am gonna have to get someone else to come and give this a try.”

Then of course a very sweet old lady comes in (who has probably been a nurse longer than Junior Senator Rick Santorum has been unpopular in San Francisco Bathhouses) and not only gets it on the first shot, but manages to do it with almost no pain at all.

My question is this: why on earth is this woman not hired full time to draw blood and paid in stacks of hundreds every day to preserve the sanity of the patient?

But I digress.

So what were the results of the x-rays and blood work? Normal. So they kept me overnight to see if things got worse or better. That officially meant that I would be missing my good friend’s wedding. Kind of bummed about it, but at least I am no longer in such pain…and that night I do get to catch the last weeks Soprano’s rerun. Ok, so I may be looking a little too hard for a silver lining here.

I call a friend at Big Bend camping with the wedding party and arrange to pick up my travel mates in a town outside the park so we can get headed home the next day.

I am discharged at 7am and drive myself the 2 hours or so it takes to get to the meeting point. I am still not feeling great…the little pain chart smiley face looks mainly confused at a solid two.

I arrive early and try to get some sleep in my rental car while waiting for them to arrive.

Dan drives and we make our way out of town to confront the 7 hours or so it will take to get back to Austin.

Then a wave hits me and I know what comes next. , “Dan…pull over now.”

--- WARNING: From here on out it gets a little graphic ---

I jump out of the car before we come to a complete stop and heave up bile. What the hell? Normally if I throw up it’s food, and then I feel better. But this same series of events happens about 4 or 5 more times before we finally stop at a state rest area. I get out, get sick, and the pain continues in my abdomen…but slowly starts getting worse.

After the rest stop I am in the back seat of the car. My hope was that I would be able to lie down and pass out. But try as I might no position is comfortable and 40 miles south of Fredericksburg (still 2 plus hours from Austin) I am writhing in pain. The smiley face pain chart face is laughing at me now and two perfectly twisted little devil horns have popped out from the top of his head.

While in the back of the car I am consumed with these thoughts. One, I have never been in this much pain in my life. Through broken knee, ankle, toe, crushed and jammed fingers, and even after my last surgery…it has never hurt this badly. Two, I am dying to ask where we are (or more to the point when we be home) but am terrified that the answer is not something I want to know the answer to. And finally I am laughing at myself. At some point between hurling bile into a plastic bag and the constantly moving from one painful position to another, all the while keeping as silent as I am able I realized how ridiculous I must have seemed to my friends in the car with me. Like a drunken mime on ecstasy or an enraged monkey with his moth taped shut. I can only imagine how uncomfortable it must have been for them.

The second we get into Fredericksburg I tell them to get me to an ER. We stop at a firehouse and within minutes Dan pulls up to the entrance and I am moving as fast as I can for the door.

Now let me preface this with two pieces of information. I like most hospital staff. I am very rarely treated badly at a hospital and grew up in and around them most of my life. I understand how they work and try my best to work within those parameters. And I also know that the moment I stepped into that ER I stopped all pretense of trying to be cool about the pain. I was officially the world’s poster boy for bad patient.

My mantra was a simple one-pain medication; you must give me pain medication.

The nurse begins with, “What would you rate your Pa-“

“10!” I say without letting her finish. “I am a 10. Didn’t you just hear my mantra?”

This goes on for what seems like days as she gets my vitals and my history. I can only speak in short hyperventilating bursts of information, “Camping – gastric bypass – abdominal pain – dehydrated – drank lots – need pain medication – you whore!”

All right. That last one was just in my head. But I think she knew what I meant. I could not sit lie, or stand still, I was seriously hoping that the pain would knock me out or I would hyperventilate myself into unconsciousness.

At one point the nurse comes over to me and tells me that I need to, “calm down and be quiet.” Never have I wanted to slap a woman. But I would have loved to shake the shit out her at that moment.

The doc finally orders a cat scan and, of course, blood work.

Cut to two hours of pain later when he comes back in and drops the bomb.

It turns out that a stricture has grown from the scar tissue from my previous surgery and is pressing against my intestine. That’s right ladies and gents. A full four months post operation I had my first real complication. I was unable to move anything past that point in my intestine and that was what was causing the abdominal pain.

How was this to be fixed? Surgery.

They would have to go in and remove the scar tissue to unblock the intestine and hope that the blood supply had not been cut off.

My big question, “Can I have some pain medication now please?

It was weird feeling as all of a sudden the nurses were treating me like I had a real problem and was not just some nut whining about a tummy ache.

So I sent Dan & Rachael home and they took me by ambulance to St. David’s Hospital in Austin. I can’t tell you when I left. I can’t tell you how long it took to get there.

I can tell you that ambulance rides in a stretcher are very bumpy. I can tell you that the driver of the ambulance had the same name as me and I would snap back to consciousness every time the female EMT would say his name.

I can also tell you that there is no heater in the back of an ambulance. For what felt like 15 minutes I had a debate in my head about asking for a blanket or asking for the heater to be turned up. I was freezing and couldn’t decide which I wanted to ask for. After, again, what seemed like fifteen minutes I opened my mouth to ask for a blanket…in my mind the more likely thing to get and was cut off by the EMT hollering out in his red neck drawl, “We’re hear buddy, let’s get you inside.”

Those must have been some really good pain meds my friends.

So this is when I met Dr. Faulkenberry who is a surgeon with the Southwest Bariatric Surgeons in Austin, TX. Dr. Faulkenberry was on call that night and was there to great me at almost the moment I was wheeled into the hospital. He clarified what was wrong with me and told me he would be operating. I can’t stress enough how high on pain medication I was. I don’t think I have ever been more agreeable and nonchalant about such a serious issue.

“You may have to slice me wide open instead of operating laproscopicly? There’s a chance I could lose pieces of my intestine? And like all surgeries there is the risk of death? That all sounds great doc…have yourself a ball.”

But there was a moment of seriousness right before I went under. It was as they were wheeling me into the operating room.

This was the second time in less than six months that I was to have been operated on. The last time I had spent an entire night writing out a last will and typing out my goodbyes to all the people in my life.

I had been given months to prepare for that first surgery. This was different. I had not had any cell phone coverage in days to call and tell anyone and the few people who knew what was going on with me had no idea who they could have called for me. There was no time given to call family and let them know. No time to call the red-headed girl I loved to tell her that I had fallen for her long ago. No time to make sure someone would care for my pets. Just no time to do anything but realize all of this as I’m scotching from the stretcher to the operating table.

I closed my eyes and thought about what I would miss more than anything else in the world if these were my last moments in this life…

Don’t ask. That moment was for me alone.

It’s probably an Oscar winning movie if that’s where it ended, but damn it all if I didn’t ruin it all by waking up.

And in my drug hazed post surgery first moments who did I call? With no cell phone in sight I dialed the only local number I had managed to store in my head.

“Hey bro…I’m in the hospital and just had surgery…I won’t be in to work today. Call mom and tell her I’m fine.”

Then I passed out until much, much later.

The operation was a success. No complications. Dr. Faulkenberry was a genius and kept the whole thing laproscopic. Just three more tiny scars to show for my bad weekend.

I called everyone I could. My mother was mad I didn’t call her. My father told me he always said I was full of shit. I called to be “officially the last person they know to congratulate them on their wedding.” I reached friends and family who had been both frantic and unaware. There were some dramatic (in my life) revelations I don’t think I’ll go into just yet. But it was all down hill from there.

I was released from the hospital on Thursday. I stayed an extra day to be treated for a bacteria infection and to make sure my temperature was normal before I went home.

I am alive and well, and I am past my first (and hopefully only) complication.

Oh yeah. What about a silver lining? I found two that week. One, I think I’ll keep to myself. The other? If you’re on IV fluids for 6 days straight you can lose 15 more pounds. Trust me on this.