Turns out I sleep like crap when I'm in the hospital. Each night was dominated by a cycle of dozing through discomfort, waking up in serious pain, trying to maneuver myself so my stitches weren't lying across the metal slat of my bed (and twice damaging my IV catheter in the process) and back to dozing.
I was really looking forward to getting the all-clear on Monday morning and going home. SWHTL had already made plans, but from our previous experiences with $IVYLEAGUEHOSPITAL we knew she shouldn't actually start making the hour trip till we knew for certain.
Anyway, because of that sleep cycle I mentioned, I was up at 5 AM, groaning, maneuvering, and, finally, giving up, and I moved myself to the chair where I repeatedly reminded myself that putting my head down on the tray table would probably tear my stitches... and in comes the day's orthopedic resident.
So, I whip out the google doc that SWHTL and I started listing questions about how to handle my at home recovery when the resident informs me that not only was I not going home that morning but that I would likely be there another 3-5 days and would be going home with an IV for giving myself antibiotics.
I took it like a man, calmly asked the rest of my questions, but after he left I had a bit of a melt down. I wake up SWHTL to tell her the news and start texting a few friends and family, starting with my sister, $HELLONURSE, and going on from there (hence my reference to cutting-and-pasting social media rants).
Then, an hour or two later, in comes an infectious disease resident. This guy tells me that things are looking great! No sign of infection had been found, yet, and the only hang up was that because I hadn't been operated on till after 10 PM on Friday the 72 hour test wouldn't technically be over till late Monday night – which meant I would probably be going home Tuesday morning, and no IV either, just oral antibiotics.
Then, at dinner time, when I was in the middle of my meal, the shift nurse walks in and tells me I’m being discharged! Now, at that point I had had enough, so I asked her to double-check and she did, and she says the answer is still yes, so I tell SWHTL and she starts driving down to get me… and then I thought, “what about my drain”, which meant finding the shift nurse again, who had to find the resident who said I was being discharged, again, and it’s another round of waiting while the resident figured out whether or not he should be changing my bandage and removing my drain – and SWHTL has literally pulled off the road to wait to find out for sure if I’m coming home or not – and I spend 10 minutes, literally standing there, bandage half-on, half-off, getting multiple text messages from multiple people in my life who all suddenly want to know how my recovery is going...
I feel like I received great care from the nurses but the delays and the communications were awful (both stays) and I'm pretty sure I've been trained to never trust a word that comes out of a resident's mouth.
| < ... and back to the hospital we go... | loitering around > |
