Wednesday, December 4, 2013

As easy as pulling duct tape off of raw pizza dough

Huh? What?  Pizza dough?  Don't worry my friends we will get there.  Let's catch up a bit.  Now where were we?  Let's see; I had a baby, she was delivered by Romeo (the hairless kid wonder), my stomach started bleeding two weeks later and we left off when I was at the hospital and they told me it was a lot of blood...

So much has happened I will give you the highlights, or more accurately, the low-lights.  So what happened?  Apparently a blood vessel was bleeding under my incision for quite some time.  They may have not clamped it off during the section, or it could have ruptured on its own.  I think they missed it during the section by a few things they said and how Romeo reacted when we crossed paths again.  But, it doesn't matter, it is what it is.  So here I am at OB triage bleeding from my belly.  They had to open up the incision and see what was what.  That was fun, shots to the belly are as pleasant as you would imagine.  Anyway, the blood had formed a pocket under my skin and now that it was released it left a 5 inch hole in its place.  The discussion was to either take me to the OR to take it down and fix it or give the wound the benefit of the doubt and trying packing it with the hopes it will close up.  The attending thought the best course of action was to give the wound a chance to heal with packing.  They packed it up with a few  feet of gauze and taught Chuck how to do it.  The gauze needed to be changed twice a day.  As we were heading out I asked what the chances were I would end up needing the surgery in the end.  A 40% chance.  I told him I didn't like those odds.  He tried to make me feel better by saying it is better than a 50-50 chance.  Yeah, I guess, but I told him if something weird were to happen...it was bound to happen to me.  A truer statement has never been spoken.

So we head home and try to relax the rest of the day.  7 p.m. comes and it is time to change the packing.  I lie down on the TV room floor, Chuck gets all the supplies ready and the girls get snacks.  Oh yeah, they couldn't wait to see the hole in my belly.  They get some Cheeze-its and step right up for a birds eye view.  Chuck grabs hold of the shoe lace shaped packing gauze and pulls.  He yells and drops the gauze.  Sara yells and Chuck grabs for some paper towels.  Apparently when teaching him how to pack it they neglected to tell it it may GUSH BLOOD when you remove the packing.  Poor thing was horrified!  The kids grimaced but kept on eating their Cheese-its.  It gets better though, he now needs to repack it...which really is a nice way of saying stuff a 4 foot bandage into your wife's abdomen using an over sized Q-tip.  So this plays out twice a day over the next several days.  Enter the visiting nurse.  So now I have a stranger coming into my home every day to pack the wound.  At this point so many people have seen the wound Chuck is convinced when all is said and done everyone in Massachusetts will see my vagina at some point.   Keep in mind my c-section scar is about and inch or two above the business end of my private parts.  Oh, and, I went into labor a week before my scheduled date...so in my mind I still had a week to "prepare"...catch my drift ladies?  Hey Bobo, I have your squatch right here (my nerdy Animal Planet watchers will get that reference)  Great, so not only do I have a newborn to care for and a hole in my belly now I have to make sure my house is clean everyday?  Great.  So the VNA nurse takes the packing out and complains that Chuck did it incorrectly and placed 2 pieces of gauze and that was absolutely not OK.  I assured her Chuck placed 1 piece of gauze.  I know he did.  I watched him.  So she repacked it with one long piece.  That night Chuck pulls the gauze out and it is only about 6 inches.  It is supposed to be about 4 feet.  Crap!  It broke.  So poor Chuck is digging around inside my belly with the Q-tip and can't find the other piece.  He is really poking around.  I felt so bad for him!  He kept saying he became an engineer for a reason!  It is now 8 at night.  I call the doc on call.  I am no doctor or nurse but I thought having a rouge piece of gauze free floating through my abdomen may warrant a call.  The on call doc seemed put out that I called.  Sorry to bother you lady.  She told me not to worry,  I had an appointment already scheduled for the next day...just pack the hole with MORE gauze.  Yup, on top of the missing piece!  I know right?  Seems like asking for trouble (or an infection perhaps?)...but, again, I am not a doctor or nurse...so who am I to question her thought process.

Well, you guessed it!  Infection!  By the time I get to the hospital the next day a distinct odor is wafting up from my belly.  The doctor takes one look at it and sends me right upstairs, upstairs being the operating room.  Yeah, I made it into the 40%, like we didn't see that coming.  So there I was sitting in the pre-op holding area with my smelly belly hooked up to a breast pump.  A great look.  A resident comes in with two way too eager medical students.  At this point I am exhausted, tired of having to tell my story over and over again and frustrated with my lack of privacy.  I am not sure if in order to be a doctor at this particular hospital you need to be missing the gene that remembers to close a door behind you.  Every single time someone would come in or leave the room they would leave the door wide open.  The majority of my visit was sans pants but no one cared.  I forget to mention earlier that when I was at the hospital the day the hole reared its ugly head while they were cutting the incision down they had the door and curtain open,  So a lovely Chinese man from across the hall ditched his wife in labor to come and check out my cooter clean out.  But I digress...back to the over eager students...I am muttering under my breath about Chuck's prediction coming true of everyone seeing my vagina.  The girl says, "oh, don't worry...it is totally normal for us to see it"...I let loose like never before!  "NORMAL?", "NORMAL?"..."there is NOTHING normal about me sitting here naked pumping milk out of my boobs in front of strangers, with a rancid hole in my belly stinking up the room while my newborn is home with a babysitter and not her mother."  The resident asked the students to leave and surprisingly I never saw them again.  Oh, and then the anesthesiologist tries to come in.  I say try because he can't figure out how to open the flippin sliding door?  Are you kidding me?  This person is the single person responsible for MY LIFE in about 10 minutes.  Not much confidence there.  They do the surgery and afterwards spring on me that I would need to be admitted overnight.  Hey, thanks for the heads up, it isn't like I have 3 kids and need to make arrangements or anything.  So I stay overnight.  Long story short, after a ton of miscommunication, a run in with Romeo...he said he was sorry I was in this situation, I said he was the one who delivered my baby, he asked if I was sure.  I said "yeah, pretty sure, there aren't very many Asian doctor's named Romeo"...what I really wanted to say was, "Is your malpractice insurance up to date?".  So they send me home with a wound vacuum.  It is a black sponge inserted into the hole, about 6 feet of clear plastic tubing attached to a vacuum pack that you carry around in a fanny pack.  So as to not bore you with all the details I will give you a few bullet points about "Vacky", that is what the girls nicknamed it...

        *It ticks.  Like a time bomb.  Constantly.  It seems to get very loud at night.  I kept thinking of Poe's Telltale Heart.  The night time ticking truly was making me insane.  I couldn't sleep, Chuck had to sleep on the couch, between the ticking and the extension cord wrapped up in the sheets it was just too much.

     *You could see the blood and other grossness being sucked through the tubing.  I didn't venture out much but when I did I just wanted to carry a huge neon sign explaining that it was not pee.  Somehow in my mind blood and pus is a bit more dignified to carry around in a fanny pack than urine.

     *You have to carry it everywhere. Many times I would forget and just get up and walk away.  It would bang Emily's crib when I would try to put her to sleep, it would bang her head at times.  In turn I would get pissed at it.  yeah, I know it is an inanimate object but I did harbor a lot of hatred for it.  One day it fell on the floor waking Emily up  and I was so pissed I kicked it across the floor.  Please take note, if in the future you find yourself the proud owner of a wound vac don't kick it across the floor.  It will never end well.  You're welcome.

     *The tubing was held in with an 8 x 10 piece of clear super sticky film.  It needed to be changed every 3 days.  I could only shower the day it was to be changed.  The smell was indescribable.  I think Cindy Anthony said it best when she said, "it smells like a damn dead body in there" (Nancy Grace watchers will appreciate that sound bite).  The smell was overwhelming.  You know when a dead body is found, the news always interviews a neighbor who made the call because of the really bad smell coming from the house.  I know of which they speak.  It was the most disgusting smell I have ever encountered.  I could not escape it either.  Remember the hole is right about my "area" when sitting down, which is pretty much all I was doing..the crotch to nose difference was only about 12, maybe 15 inches.  It friggin smelled!  It made me want to vomit.  The smell was everywhere.  My bedroom was the worst.  So now to the duct tape and pizza dough you have been wondering about.    The super sticky film barrier would need to be removed.  Emily is my third child.  I was 2 weeks post partum at the time.  There was nothing taut about my belly.  When the VNA would pull it off it would be as if she were pulling duct tape off of pizza dough.  Not easy to do.  Oh and don't forget I hadn't had taken care of business before delivery and now here I am even 2 weeks later, so every 3 days I got the pleasure of a free bikini wax from a stranger.  Oh, and every time they came to change the vac it would be a different nurse.  I was so sick of making small talk with strangers as they ripped off my skin, hair and dignity as they literally put their face in my crotch to analyze the smell.  To add insult to injury they didn't even buy me dinner afterwards!

So I had the vac in for 2 weeks.  As you can imagine it didn't go smoothly...it malfunctioned a time or two, I had to make several emergency trips in to the city to get it reattached.   At the 2 week mark the vac had not had a significant impact on the healing process and I was D.O.N.E--Done!!  I went back to my  OB's office with guns blazing.  I was not leaving with the vac.  I would chain myself to the exam table if need be.  So the medical assistant comes in.  She is a temp.  She is at least 80 years old if she is a day.  She is even wearing an old lady shawl.  She asks me how I am.  I lay into her, pleading my case as to why I am not leaving with the wound vac (the smell, the ticking, whacking Em in the head, waking her up when it bangs the crib, the removal of several layers of skin with each dressing change, etc., etc...She looks overwhelmed. Get a hold of yourself Erin, she is elderly.  Back off, she is wearing a shawl for Christ's sake!  A SHAWL!  So I apologize and wait for my OB to come in.  She does.  As soon as she walks in she comments on the smell.  She opens the dressing and proceeds to put her face in my crotch...I guess the pungent stench wasn't enough, she needed to really get a  good whiff.  The nurse comes in with some supplies, lasts a minute or two but needs to leave...THE SMELL WAS THAT BAD!!  She is an OB nurse...she smells gross things all the time.  My belly hole sent her over the edge.  I guess the saying is true, Go Big or Go Home!  Did I mention that I wasn't going home?  Not with that flippin wound vac anyway.  So the decision is made to send me back up to the OR.  At this point there has been so many miscommunications and dropped balls that I am questioning EVERYTHING, even the way they are breathing.  So I ask about the procedure.  They explain it to me.  I ask if this is something that can be done with just local anesthesia...I wanted to keep my eyes on them.  They relent and let me do it with out being put under.  OK, here is a tip for you...if you are ever given the option of having surgery done with anesthesia get knocked the eff out!!   What they did to me would not be allowed under The Geneva Conventions.  It was downright criminal.  Oh, and it turns out I am not as tough as I thought.  Halfway through I was dying!  Actually, dying may have been the easy way out at that point.  But I survived.  I can't say the same about a nursing student that was observing.  I am not sure if it was the god awful smell wafting from my stomach hole  or the brutality of the procedure but she left.  She never came back.  I think she may have given up medicine entirely...I am not quite sure but last week as I was driving by the Gap I could have sworn I saw her working the sales floor...

I did leave the hospital that night without the vac so I should be grateful for small miracles?  I am now 10 weeks post partum and I remain vacuum free...sadly, not hole free.  Since the vac removal the corrective procedure they did was not successful.  They tried packing with gauze again, fail!  They tried  packing it with seaweed, I sh*t you not, you read that correctly.  Other than making my wound smell like low tide (which is awesome since it is in such close proximity to my crotch...insert your own joke here) it also failed!  Last time I was at the hospital they tried using Silver Nitrate to speed the healing.  When I worked in the ER I remembered when burn patients came in they used something called Silverdene.  The patients loved it, it had a cooling effect.  For the mere fact of both things beginning with the word Silver I assumed the Silver Nitrate would be the same.  BIG MISTAKE!!!  I was laying on the exam table chatting with the doctor when she put it on.  I wanted to scream at her, "WTF?...you are burning me!!!", but since my 4 year old was in the room all I could say was, "wow, that feels kind of warm".  So all the other stuff didn't work I had no hope that charring my skin would make a difference and sadly, I was right.  In addition to the countless trips to the hospital, a gross skin infection (remember I have that lovely skin apron covering the hole...if you are a new blog reader check out my old post "My Body is a Wonderland"...that will explain the apron)  a VNA nurse who bordered on being a stalker (at one point Anna asked in front of her if she was the crazy nurse), we have had 2 birthday parties, school events and a few holidays.  This has been the most action packed 10 weeks ever!!  Not the maternity leave I had imagined!  So tomorrow I am meeting with a plastic surgeon to see where we go from here...I think I am going to lobby for them to throw in a free tummy tuck while they fix the hole.  It is the least they can do for all the trouble they caused me.  Today is my birthday...I am 41.  As a birthday gift to me she slept until 6:30 this morning!!  (She has been sleeping from 8 p.m. to 5:30 for a while now.  I think she believes if she is the best baby ever I will stop leaving her with sitters and actually spend some time with her.)  But no worries, Anna got up at 5:20 to remind me it was my birthday...she is so considerate like that!I keep telling myself this is the payback I get for having the nerve to have a baby after 40.  But I would do it all again 10 times over because I have my sweet Emily baby...

Sounds crazy right?  If all that weren't enough I had a whole other situation to deal with about 2 weeks ago....again, I can NOT make this stuff up!!  The next chapter involves an ambulance, flying reindeer and a puppy.  Stay tuned...

1 comment:

  1. oh Erin! I keep thinking you are over the worst and it never ends! I hope you have a good lawyer and get something for all this in the end. I laughed and cried thru this post and snorted and woke Ray up! If the next Stephen King novel has any of this in it we will all know where he stole it from!

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