The Remnants of Emergency Surgery
Three weeks ago, I had a tumor removed from my brain. A day ago, I’d had a whopper of a nosebleed that had been mistakenly passed off as nothing to worry about. Then earlier today I’d had the mother of all nose bleeds. I had been life-flighted from my local hospital two hours away to Mass General for emergency surgery at 3 AM.
When I woke up from my five-and-a-half-hour-long surgery to fix the post-op bleed in my brain I was wrapped in some kind of silver warming blanket. There was an IV in my foot with blood going in. Another bag of blood was running through one tube in my recently placed central line. In the other central line lumen, I had some other bag going through. An IV in my left knuckle was hooked up to a bag of something else.
Re-Orienting Myself in the PACU after Surgery
Relief flooded through me when I realized that both rhino rockets had been removed from my nose. Instead, I was packed with gauze in both nostrils. This didn’t cause nearly as much discomfort as the rhino rockets had. My throat was sore, and my voice crackled from the breathing tube that had been in my throat and lungs for the long surgery. There was a catheter in my urethra and an oxygen mask over my face. I had wires coming out of me everywhere. They were all hooked up to a bedside monitor in the PACU.
My body felt like it had been run over by a truck, then a train, and then a car. The room spun around me slightly as if I were on some sort of cheap carnival ride. Pain pounded inside my head and heart like a jackhammer. It felt like the inside of my nose had been torn apart and then stitched back together with fishing line. and my mouth was cotton-ball-dry. Those same cotton balls seemed to be filling up my head.
Finding my Safety Net After Surgery
As soon as I saw my mom sitting in the chair next to my stretcher, in the little cubicle in the PACU, I immediately felt better.
“Mom,” I rasped.
“Hey Becca, you’re awake!” she said.
“How long have you been here?” I asked her.
“I got here about three and a half hours ago. You were still touch n go in surgery when I got here.”
“I’m so glad you’re here,” I told her.
“That was the worst drive of my life.” She admitted to me. “They didn’t know if you were going to make it or not. The whole time I was driving here I was just praying that I hadn’t seen you for the last time when they loaded you into the Life Flight helicopter. About twenty minutes into the drive I got a phone call that you had lost massive amounts of blood and that they couldn’t control the bleeding, and they were taking you into surgery immediately. I was terrified and the worst part was that there was not one little thing I could do about it.”
My mom put her hand on my hand that wasn’t hosting an IV line and gave me a squeeze.
“I’m so sorry mom,” I told her.
“It’s not your fault, silly,” she smiled at me.
Diabetes Insipidus Deja Vu After Surgery Number Two
Just about then I started noticing how thirsty I was. It was like deja vu to the last surgery.
The nurse brought me water when I asked for it but then ended up cutting me off the water after I drank six cups and gave me popsicles instead.
“You missed a dose of desmopressin today,” Dr. Swearingen told me after he explained to me that they had taken care of the bleed and put a clip in my brain to fix it. “Now your sodium is sky high, but we can’t give you the nasal dose because your nose needs to stay packed for a while. We’ll have to switch you to the pills from now on, even though they don’t usually work quite as well.”
I stayed in the PACU about an hour longer receiving repeated doses of IV Dilaudid and IV Zofran to keep me as comfortable as possible.
Famous For Still Being Alive
People kept walking by my room, staring in at me and saying, “That’s the girl that was 4 and 15.”
My nurse explained to my mom and me that my hemoglobin had been 4 and my hematocrit had been 15, both crazy low levels from all of the blood loss.
“Most people whose blood counts get that low don’t survive,” she explained to us. “And here you are sitting up, talking and breathing with just a little help from an oxygen mask. It’s kind of like a miracle.”
That blew my mind. It also really scared me that I had been so close to death.
After I had been observed long enough in the PACU they moved me to the ICU floor. My mom and the nurse helped me settle in.
A Desperate Thirst
The ICU nurse explained that they were putting me on a fluid restriction. They were trying to cut down the excessive amounts of urine I was putting out in the catheter bag. Halfway through the night, I was so thirsty I couldn’t stand it.
They had told me not to try to get out of bed by myself. Even before this last surgery, I was wobbly when I walked. However, I was so desperately thirsty that I was on a mission to drink some water out of the bathroom sink. I had already exceeded the amount I was allowed to drink by mouth, but from how thirsty I was it sure didn’t seem like it.
My mom had already gone home so I unplugged the IV pole myself. Then I slowly got out of bed as the room tilted and swirled around me. I took little steps toward the bathroom hanging on to the IV pole with a death grip.
Every step hurt because of the IV in my foot, but I made it there and began cupping water into my hands and greedily slurping it down. I managed to drink a substantial amount of the coveted water before I felt a hand clamp down on my shoulder and heard a voice say, “busted”.
Slowly I spun around to see who was there. It was my nurse trying to look stern but failing.
Diabetes Insipidus House Arrest
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I was just so thirsty I couldn’t stand it,”
“First of all, you’re going to get very sick if you keep drinking the amounts you’re drinking. Second of all, you’re not steady enough on your feet to get up by yourself and you’re lucky you didn’t wipe out going all the way across the room without help.”
The nurse took my arm gently and escorted me back to my bed.
“We’re going to have to put you on diabetes insipidus house arrest now,” she told me. “I’m putting the bed alarm on and turning off the sink so that you can’t drink out of it anymore. Don’t get any good ideas about the toilet.” she laughed.
I giggled a little bit too, but as I lay there the rest of the night all I could think about was that maybe the toilet wasn’t as bad an option as it seemed.
Yes, I was that thirsty.
