…and I went back to the ER for a truly hellish experience shortly after midnight, not getting home until now at 5:00 a.m.
if u happen to have a CT scan after abdominal surgery and nobody tells you anything about the results, you might want to ask them if they saw blood in there. if they did, do not try to lay flat on your back for a few days at least.
it seems some loose blood from the surgery lapped gently against my diaphragm, triggering spasms that felt much like what you would imagine of a heart attack, only more violent.
kinda like my chest tried to rip itself apart, followed by spasms in a heart-sized area and seeming to follow a heartbeat, during which pain was truly extreme and breathing was not possible.
over the next fifteen minutes the spasms grew further apart and more faint until they stopped, but yeah, somehow I missed a few very important memos about possible side effects of this surgery.
i try to sleep now.
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Yeah, not telling patients stuff they need to know is a thing.
A while back, I got laproscopic gall bladder surgery (“lap chol”) It was supposed to be outpatient surgery — go home the same day. So I arranged everything assuming I wouldn’t stay and someone would bring me right home.
However, it seems that part of laproscopic surgery is inflating the abdomen, the better to see and get at what needs to be seen and gotten at. And somehow, they left a lot of the gas in when they were done, because when I came to, it hurt like crazy if I tried to take a deep breath, or even a shallow one. It seems the extra gas was pressing on my diaphragm, so when I took a breath, the gas pushed back. So they admitted me, perhaps because of how much I was complaining that I couldn’t breathe. It was two days before I could breathe well enough to go home.
While it would have been nice if they’d gotten more of the gas out, I can see that it might involve difficult stuff that I don’t know about. But it would have been nice if they’d prepared me for the possibility of complications.
It left me afraid of any kind of laproscopic procedures, but then I had surgery earlier this year, also laproscopic, and a lot more complicated, and there was no problem breathing.
Yikes! Take it easy for a while now…
Yikes! Must have been very frightening for you, and for your partner.
I was lucky when I had laproscopic surguery, the nurse looking after me had had similar surgery, and told me about the gas, that it had to come out one way or the other, so you’d fart it out or you’d “throw it up”. She reassured me that the glue holding the wound together wouldn’t fail, and I wouldn’t split the wound open, very glad she did as the throwing up spasms were intense and I would have been terrified I was going to burst without having heard her reassurance first. But she admitted that before she’d had her surgery it had never occured to her to mention it to a patient, even though she knew about it intellectually, feeling it made all the difference. I have often wished there was a way to make doctors feel what we feel . . .
I hope that’s the worst of it and your healing is smooth from now on!
Thanks for the support guys. Still feeling jacked up, but settled down a lot. Why does it not surprise me other people had these kinds of experiences?
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