My Everest…

I wake up in the OR they are waiting on a bed to become available in the recovery so they  tell me that I probably will not be there long as i am already conscious and they ask about my pain and i’m like 8 or so and then they ask me if I have a history of low blood pressure and if I’m dizzy no and not and the moment but I may become dizzy when I stand who knows.  Apparently I’m setting off the monitors as my blood pressure won’t come up and my oxygen monitor the thingy they put on your finger is setting off alarms also. So off to recovery with a warm blanket I go!   Once there they try to take my pressure on one arm then the other….same result maybe minimally better on the other side.   Same with the oxygen monitor, this finger, that finger, finally it ends up on my toes !!  Pain level???  7-8  more meds….. They brief me that once I get over to day surgery beds there they will ask me to go pee and then after that they will wait 30 mins and then I am free to go home.  Ok?  Ok?  But they still don’t like my low blood pressure and oxygen levels.   Over to day surgery I went where the anesthesiologist I had was still around so he asked me to be monitored still.   I went to the washroom with the nurses right when I got there but hello dizzy!!!   I could barely walk there on my own power ok yes I am usually loopy from drugs and such but this is new.   Weak, dizzy, drugged up and low bp and oxygen and time is ticking for day surgery nurses to go home and there I am not ready to go home.  I could barely sit on a toilet on my own let alone walk to it but we did as a team 3 people.  One one each arm one pushing a wheelchair in case I fell and this was how we did it my friends. They  looked at me and the nurses are like you can’t go home tonight.  My husband and I are saying there’s no way I can even think about trying to make it down the hallway to get into our new home, and here the doctor is saying there are no beds and she needs to go home.   They tried to take my bp standing and I’m like I can’t even stand. I’m like a limp noodle and you want me to do what?   So the resident general surgeon on call graced us with his presence.  The nurse along with my husband and I plead our case to the dr god as he tries to get me to stand and walk on my own power and I’m like buddy nope I’m not walking without someone to be able to fall on beside me. You need to keep me here for observation because nothing that you have been monitoring since 2pm has gotten better so you think sending me home will?    If you send me home and I fall then I am back here in worse shape then now because I’m coming in via ambulance and probably popping stitches etc.   Pick your poison.   My husband was livid as for a while there it looked like I was going home…. Finally he told the nurse to send me back to PACU (Recovery) where I originally came from.   He told me that is where I would stay until they found a bed for me.  At 3 a.m. I had a bed and a room whoo hoo !!! 

When my doctor’s resident came to see me he was puzzled by my symptoms as I developed another one during the night.   Everytime I would sit up for a bit (because they will not let you lie in bed) I would get a migraine.   I spent a good part of the night in recovery with one and I wasn’t sure what it was from and then eventually I put it together.   As I sat up and it came to the part where it was the most painful, the pain shot thru my body like a lightning bolt and into my skull causing the most fabulous migraines one could ever have imagined.  Light sensitivity and all the trimmings came with it like a turkey on thanksgiving !  But when I told the Dr’s that the look I got was like they didn’t believe me…..either they upped my meds or something but they went away thankfully.   I was so desperate to get them to believe me that I even explained to them about my cervicogenical migraines and asked them to call my neurologist to let him know what was happening so that he could advise them…they didn’t contact him. Then they brought in a physio to get me moving and I briefly explained the headaches again and my central sensitization issues…he kind of let on that he understood but then he told that the pain was in my brain and I said yup I know it is.  So you keep telling yourself that as it’s not real…..WTF????   My migraine is not real?   My surgical site (ass) pain is not real?   My everywhere else that my body is painful is not real?   He measured me for a walker and I bit my lip for the rest of his time with me because of course all of this time everything I have been telling my husband about my pain was bullshit!  (if he heard it I don’t know, as he didn’t say a word afterwards).   There may have been too much going on.