Thursday, March 8, 2012

Post-Op

I started this post about two years ago and it apparently never got published. Despite the delay, I think you will find this insight into socialized European medicine to be interesting.




     I am now a full three days post-op and back home recovering and doing very well. They were able to do the surgery laparoscopically and I have had no pain at all from the surgery. I am very grateful. My energy level is up and all seems to be healing well.
I must confess it was a bit scary going in for surgery in a foreign country not knowing how well the language barrier would be penetrated by those in whose hands I was to entrust my life and health. It was unnerving to not understand how the system worked or what was going to happen.

      There were many things that were the same or similar to my experience last fall in the United States when I had major surgery there and there were some significant differences.
One of the things I never get used to here is getting an injection without any skin prep. No swabbing, no cleaning, just plunge it in there. The only time I was swabbed was when they put in an IV and when they took blood to check for infection.


      Jon and I arrived at the hospital and since we didnt know where to go we went to information and asked. They directed us to the second floor. We took the elevators and there was no one around. We wandered the halls and found no one. We called out "Hallo" and got no response. I read the signs and nothing said anything about operations, so thinking that there was a language issue, we got back into the elevator and went up another floor. Here it said operations, but again no one around. We wander and call. We go back down to the second floor and wander some more. We find a nurse and she says yes this is the floor and that we just have to wander around until we find someone. We wander and call but never do. We go back to the third floor. We have now missed our arrival time and wonder if I will lose my spot on the operating schedule as a "no show". The Dutch are after all a punctual people. We go back to the third floor. We do finally find some people in a cardiac unit and a nurse there calls for us and directs us downstairs and, bless him, he actually took us down there and found out where we needed to be.


     I am taken to my room, given a gown to put on and told to get changed. A few questions about medications and food intake and I am fairly quickly wheeled into the big room that is the pre-op area. The Lord provides for me an anesthesia nurse who has spent six months bicycling across America and his English is very good. He chats with me and I get an IV, etc. I wait around, by myself, because Jon was not allowed to come with me. The surgeon shows up. It is not the surgeon I saw in my first appointment and it is not the second one who looked at my ultrasound and scheduled the operation. I have never met him before, but he jokes with me and seems old enough to be well experienced and young enough to have good steady hands.
After a short bit I am wheeled into the operating room and I switch beds. They hook up saline to my port and then fiddle here and there getting my arms situated so they dont fall off the table and my nurse tells me all that he is doing, which I appreciate. Finally the anesthesiologist comes and I get oxygen and something in my IV to knock me out. In a minute or so I am out.
I wake up, kind of, to someone calling me. "Mevrouw (Mrs. or madame) Fiet, breathe." " Mevrouw Fiet, take a deep breath." So I do. My hand goes to my stomach and I can feel several bandages so I know they were able to do it laparoscopically and I was relieved. Seconds go by and I get the command to breathe again. So I do. Then I lay there aware that seconds are going by but I have no need to breathe again. I am too drugged to open my eyes, but alert enough to be aware of my little experiment. Strange to not feel the need to breathe. I know I need to so I inhale and have to make the effort to do. Exhaling is easy, but inhaling is a bit of work. So I lie there actively breathing.


     I lie there for a while in a sort of fog. I don't know how long I have been asleep and have no awareness of the passage of time. It will turn out to be about a half an hour operation and I slept another two hours or so, then drifted in the fog for a half hour or so until being taken to my room. When I get there, Jon appears and my good friend and coworker, Carol, who has ridden her bike to the hospital to keep Jon company while he waited.
I talk with Jon and emerge slowly from the fog. I am given medicine for pain, though I have none. I try to tell them I dont need it. Stomach says its too soon to have something in it and rebels. I try to sleep. It isnt until later that I realize they never brought me lunch. I never missed it. They do bring dinner, but I have homemade rolls from home, so I eat part of one of those. I am not hungry, but feel I need to eat something. Jon tastes my dinner. Sausage, potatoes and beets and chocolate pudding. He likes it, but feels funny eating my food. I'm not going to eat it, seems a shame to let it go to waste.


      All day and night and the next morning I am still trying to sleep off my drug haze, but find this hospital to be unbelievably noisy. The lights are on in the hall all night and I have to lie on the side that faces the door. It is uncomfortable to lie the other way. People are talking loudly in the hall and in my room which I find I am sharing with an elderly man. That is really strange. Jon walks up and down the hallway and finds most rooms are co-ed. We wonder about that, wondering if there is some reason for it or if it is just a random selection of roommates. My roommate seems ill from the coughing he does and just the thought of being in a room with sick person while recovering makes me feel a bit nervous. Normally I wouldnt give it a thought, but recovering post-op and getting exposed to something isn't an experience I want to have.
All the nurses are kind and most can speak at least enough English that I can understand them and simple instructions. One gal does give up on me and gets someone else to help me. They are, however, incredibly loud. The talking in the room and out, the laughing in the halls, the dropping of trays of items which I counted at least four time with the accompaning sounds of breakage. It is all the more remarkable because as a rule, Europeans are the quietest people in public. Americans are known as loud and boisterous because while on vacation we are so in comparison with Europeans. You can have streets full of folks at the Oude Barneveld or at the Fair or just walking on city streets or eating in outdoor cafes and barely hear a murmur of conversation. So the hospital was a completely unexpected experience. I was sooooo tired and couldnt sleep. I would just fall asleep, go immediately into dreaming from fatigue, only to wake up a minute later. This went on all day and evening. I must have had a hundred extremely short dreams that day. And this with an eyemask over my eyes and good earplugs in my ears. I am a light sleeper, so I had come prepared for a normal amount of hospital noise.
We asked if I could go home that night. I was so very tired I just wanted to go home and sleep. The doctor said no, not that I saw him that day at all after the surgery, but the nurse called for me. I was very disappointed but had been praying so figured the Lord knew what he was doing.


     I was able to snatch sleep in 1 1/2 hour to two hour intervals through the night. It was quieter, but there was enough noise and that dreaded hallway light and a door always open so it all came tumbling in.


      The next morning I was cranky and irritable and just wanted outta there. I had a low grade fever and feared I would be forced to stay. Jon wasn't allowed to come back until 10:30 in the morning so I had about five hours waiting for him. Bored, tired, just wanting to go home.
Finally around ten o'clock the surgeon comes in and says I can go home. Yea! I jumped up with cheer. I got dressed, called Jon to come get me and we got our post-op instructions and prescriptions.