Ow
May 03, 2009 07:46 PM
You know, in my last post, I contemplated how to
follow up my incredible run of bad experiences. Well,
I found my answer and it is detailed below.
I should first warn the reader that what follows is a particularly graphic rendition of one of my experiences in the hospital. It includes incompetent nurses, mismanaged catheters, and a great deal of urine. If you don’t want to read about such things, (and really, why would you?) you should just stop here now.
If, however, you feel a slight tinge of relief when you hear about horrible things happening to other people and not you (and I’m told the ancient Greeks actually had a word for this momentary feeling of relief) then read on.
First the quick summary: I am home from my days at UCSF Hospital and my lung surgery went just fine. No surprises, and no complications. I’m currently taking some pain meds which should get me through the next few days.
Now for a little medical lesson and some background. When you go in for surgery, the medical technicians and nurses give you a catheter (fortunately, after you have already been put to sleep). This insures there are no accidents during surgery. Which, by the way there would certainly be, because general anesthesia gives the patient complete loss of bladder control, even after you come out from under anesthesia.
Typically the catheter is removed after about twenty four hours. Well, during my first surgery in October, this did not go particularly well. It turns out that my bladder requires just a little more time to wake up. And again, I’m speaking here of last October, when the catheter was removed, I was unable to pee the following morning. Nothing. Zilch. Good intentions didn’t help me here. The only solution to this situation is to have the catheter put back in.
Now for those of you who have not had the pleasure of experiencing a catheter, let me illustrate it as delicately and gracefully as I can. I would put it this way....Having a catheter inserted when you are conscious resembles nothing so much as having twelve pounds of shattered glass blown through your urethra by a rusty cannon. While painful for everyone, I’m told it is particularly bad for men. One nurse told me that the mere mention of the word is usually enough to reduce the most macho tough guy to tears.
I believe it.
And the truth is, that after the second day of my recuperation in October, I still was unable to pee after the catheter was removed. And you know what that means now, right? Yes. It was put back in a THIRD time.
Now I was in no hurry to repeat that experience this time and while I was wheeled to my hospital room last week, I heard my surgeon give a medical technician the order to pull my catheter the next day. “No!” I said, “That is too soon! I wasn’t ready before! I need at least another day, please!” But my surgeon wouldn’t have it. She said, “The longer it stays inside you the higher the risk of infection”
“Infection?” I thought. “So what! I’ll drink only cranberry juice for the rest of the month, I don’t care! I just don’t want it removed so soon!” Well the order didn’t change and it was removed the next evening. And sure enough, the next day I woke up and tried to pee. No go.
I was annoyed, but not yet alarmed. I didn’t feel that familiar pressure. I decided to wait a bit to see what would happen. Maybe I could wait an hour or so and then see if my luck improved. Well, I accidentally fell asleep (the consequence of my roomie from hell’s snoring and burping in his sleep...a future blog post, I promise). When I woke up two hours later, I started to panic. I felt the pressure. And there is only one thing that makes anyone actually WANT a catheter, and that is the growing fear that your bladder is about to burst and there is nothing you can do about it.
I ran to the nurses’ station. “You have to help me!” I shouted, “My catheter was removed and I still have no control of my bladder! I need the catheter put back in right away! Right away! Right away! Right away!” I kept repeating it. You see, there is one other detail I failed to mention about last October. It so happened that when I needed the catheter reinserted, the entire nursing staff was on another floor for a staff meeting. I had to wait in mind numbing agony for over and hour before it was reinserted and I got relief.
“There is NO WAY I am going to go through THAT again,” I shouted. Please, please please! Get someone in my room NOW!
Imagine if you will the feeling that you have to pee so badly, but that you can’t. The pressure does NOT stop building up. How bad do you think it would feel after fifteen minutes? How bad do you think it would feel after thirty minutes? What if this entire time, you also had no information regarding just how long you would have to wait. Hmm? Do you think you would be a bit concerned? I was!
After forty-five minutes I was screaming and cursing in my hospital bed. I began to throw things. There was NO ONE in my room. Apparently it was taking the nursing staff a while to recognize the urgency of the situation. Tears were streaming down my face. I started to lose any power to vocalize. My voice became a whisper. “Please......please....please....”
At this time a nurse came into my room casually. “Okay, we only need a doctor’s order to put the catheter back in.That is all we are waiting for” but when she finally looked up to meet my gaze, it was all I could do to stare intently at her while shaking violently. I could not speak. And seeing for the first time what was really happening she said, “Okay.....I am going to see what I can do to hurry it up.”
Finally two other nurses came in to prep the catheter so it could be inserted the moment they had the doctor’s order. But I was clearly suffering and one of the nurses finally said, “I don’t care, I’m just going to put it in, orders or not.” I looked at the clock. Seventy minutes had passed since I ran to the nurses station.
Relief. Sweet relief. It was back in. I began to urinate. They had a bowl of sorts at the end of a hose to catch it all. It kept coming. Soon, it became clear that the bowl was about to be full. The nurses hurriedly got another. Each bowl held a liter of fluid. As the bowls were switched the room became silent. All of the staff who had entered the room fell into a reverent silence as they began to understand just what they were seeing and what, presumably, I had been through.
When it was over, the amount of fluid was 1.5 liters. Yes. 1.5 liters. No one had seen anything like it before. The adult bladder typically holds about 800 cc of fluid when full. I had held back almost twice that.
After that morning, the nursing staff was incredibly nice to me. I had achieved a strange kind of notoriety on the floor. Everyone seemed to finally understand that I had endured extreme pain and got no assistance. And maybe just maybe, they were wondering what kind of report I would file because of it.
Later that afternoon, I woke from a nap to find my surgeon holding my hand.
“I’m sorry.” she said. “You were right. And if you ever need to come back here, we will let you decide when the catheter comes out.”
Damn right.
I should first warn the reader that what follows is a particularly graphic rendition of one of my experiences in the hospital. It includes incompetent nurses, mismanaged catheters, and a great deal of urine. If you don’t want to read about such things, (and really, why would you?) you should just stop here now.
If, however, you feel a slight tinge of relief when you hear about horrible things happening to other people and not you (and I’m told the ancient Greeks actually had a word for this momentary feeling of relief) then read on.
First the quick summary: I am home from my days at UCSF Hospital and my lung surgery went just fine. No surprises, and no complications. I’m currently taking some pain meds which should get me through the next few days.
Now for a little medical lesson and some background. When you go in for surgery, the medical technicians and nurses give you a catheter (fortunately, after you have already been put to sleep). This insures there are no accidents during surgery. Which, by the way there would certainly be, because general anesthesia gives the patient complete loss of bladder control, even after you come out from under anesthesia.
Typically the catheter is removed after about twenty four hours. Well, during my first surgery in October, this did not go particularly well. It turns out that my bladder requires just a little more time to wake up. And again, I’m speaking here of last October, when the catheter was removed, I was unable to pee the following morning. Nothing. Zilch. Good intentions didn’t help me here. The only solution to this situation is to have the catheter put back in.
Now for those of you who have not had the pleasure of experiencing a catheter, let me illustrate it as delicately and gracefully as I can. I would put it this way....Having a catheter inserted when you are conscious resembles nothing so much as having twelve pounds of shattered glass blown through your urethra by a rusty cannon. While painful for everyone, I’m told it is particularly bad for men. One nurse told me that the mere mention of the word is usually enough to reduce the most macho tough guy to tears.
I believe it.
And the truth is, that after the second day of my recuperation in October, I still was unable to pee after the catheter was removed. And you know what that means now, right? Yes. It was put back in a THIRD time.
Now I was in no hurry to repeat that experience this time and while I was wheeled to my hospital room last week, I heard my surgeon give a medical technician the order to pull my catheter the next day. “No!” I said, “That is too soon! I wasn’t ready before! I need at least another day, please!” But my surgeon wouldn’t have it. She said, “The longer it stays inside you the higher the risk of infection”
“Infection?” I thought. “So what! I’ll drink only cranberry juice for the rest of the month, I don’t care! I just don’t want it removed so soon!” Well the order didn’t change and it was removed the next evening. And sure enough, the next day I woke up and tried to pee. No go.
I was annoyed, but not yet alarmed. I didn’t feel that familiar pressure. I decided to wait a bit to see what would happen. Maybe I could wait an hour or so and then see if my luck improved. Well, I accidentally fell asleep (the consequence of my roomie from hell’s snoring and burping in his sleep...a future blog post, I promise). When I woke up two hours later, I started to panic. I felt the pressure. And there is only one thing that makes anyone actually WANT a catheter, and that is the growing fear that your bladder is about to burst and there is nothing you can do about it.
I ran to the nurses’ station. “You have to help me!” I shouted, “My catheter was removed and I still have no control of my bladder! I need the catheter put back in right away! Right away! Right away! Right away!” I kept repeating it. You see, there is one other detail I failed to mention about last October. It so happened that when I needed the catheter reinserted, the entire nursing staff was on another floor for a staff meeting. I had to wait in mind numbing agony for over and hour before it was reinserted and I got relief.
“There is NO WAY I am going to go through THAT again,” I shouted. Please, please please! Get someone in my room NOW!
Imagine if you will the feeling that you have to pee so badly, but that you can’t. The pressure does NOT stop building up. How bad do you think it would feel after fifteen minutes? How bad do you think it would feel after thirty minutes? What if this entire time, you also had no information regarding just how long you would have to wait. Hmm? Do you think you would be a bit concerned? I was!
After forty-five minutes I was screaming and cursing in my hospital bed. I began to throw things. There was NO ONE in my room. Apparently it was taking the nursing staff a while to recognize the urgency of the situation. Tears were streaming down my face. I started to lose any power to vocalize. My voice became a whisper. “Please......please....please....”
At this time a nurse came into my room casually. “Okay, we only need a doctor’s order to put the catheter back in.That is all we are waiting for” but when she finally looked up to meet my gaze, it was all I could do to stare intently at her while shaking violently. I could not speak. And seeing for the first time what was really happening she said, “Okay.....I am going to see what I can do to hurry it up.”
Finally two other nurses came in to prep the catheter so it could be inserted the moment they had the doctor’s order. But I was clearly suffering and one of the nurses finally said, “I don’t care, I’m just going to put it in, orders or not.” I looked at the clock. Seventy minutes had passed since I ran to the nurses station.
Relief. Sweet relief. It was back in. I began to urinate. They had a bowl of sorts at the end of a hose to catch it all. It kept coming. Soon, it became clear that the bowl was about to be full. The nurses hurriedly got another. Each bowl held a liter of fluid. As the bowls were switched the room became silent. All of the staff who had entered the room fell into a reverent silence as they began to understand just what they were seeing and what, presumably, I had been through.
When it was over, the amount of fluid was 1.5 liters. Yes. 1.5 liters. No one had seen anything like it before. The adult bladder typically holds about 800 cc of fluid when full. I had held back almost twice that.
After that morning, the nursing staff was incredibly nice to me. I had achieved a strange kind of notoriety on the floor. Everyone seemed to finally understand that I had endured extreme pain and got no assistance. And maybe just maybe, they were wondering what kind of report I would file because of it.
Later that afternoon, I woke from a nap to find my surgeon holding my hand.
“I’m sorry.” she said. “You were right. And if you ever need to come back here, we will let you decide when the catheter comes out.”
Damn right.