Drawing A Blank

 I heard a woman scream, but I wasn’t sure where it came from. It was me, but was it in my mind or did I actually scream.  I was in recovery.  I was waking up from my surgery. They had just placed the feeding tube. I didn’t want to look at it. It was the worst thing I had ever seen in my life, but in reality I had seen so much worse.  I had actually seen a man come into an ER that I worked gut shot.  I must have actually made some kind of sound because I heard the nurses tell my daughter that it was a normal reaction. They had to give me medication to calm me down.  It was not a normal reaction for me.  When it comes to medical processes, I’m a very put together person. I find most everything in the medical field fascinating and I want to dig deeper into it. When I looked down and saw that I had two tubes coming out of my stomach all I could fathom was some kind of monster. As a matter of fact, what I thought of was someone had attached two tentacles to my abdomen.  What had I done to myself?  

Psalms 102:1-2. Lord, hear my prayer;

                            let my cry for help come before you.

                            Do not hide your face from me in my day of trouble.

                            Listen closely to me;

                            answer me quickly when I call.

When I came back around, I could hear my G.I. Specialist talking to my best friend and my daughter. He was actually having them record the conversation so I could listen to it later. He was explaining the surgery again and explaining the care of the tubes.  I was trying to listen very carefully to him, but trying not to look at the tubes at the same time. Looking down and seeing them in my stomach seem to give me an immense amount of anxiety. When the doctor walked off, I finally asked my best friend and daughter if I was actually screaming and they said yes, when I came to the first time I was screaming. “What have I done? What have I done?” Placing a feeding tube is a day surgery so it didn’t take long for the nurses to come and discharge me home and make sure I had the number for the home health agency. The discharge nurse told me when I got home to call the home health agency, and they would make sure everything was in order.  When you have a surgery like this you have to make sure that when you go home all of your supplies are in order.  For instance,  my Kangaroo pump, my nutrition, and all my supplies to take care of my tubes was supposed to be shipped to me overnight by a company called Lincare.  Well this is a blessing and a curse.  When I got home the day of the surgery I had nothing, so I called my Home Health Agency, hereafter referred to as, Chambers or Chamber’s Home Health.  By the way, if I forget to say it, this is the greatest Home Health ever.  They immediately had my nurse call me that afternoon to see what all I needed for the next morning. I was not able to feed for 24 hours after the surgery and she came out the first thing in the morning and started showing my daughter and best friend how to clean and take care of the wound around the tubes.  My Kangaroo pump and nutrition was supposed to be in the day of my surgery but it did not arrive so Chamber’s called Lincare to see what was going on.  Lincare said to Chamber’s that it would be there on that day, this was June 12, the day after my surgery, when I was supposed to start nutrition.  Mind you, I am unable to take anything by mouth at this point per the GI Specialist.  I am really not hungry and honestly don’t even care about food, nutrition, or anything else.  On day 2 after surgery my Kangaroo pump arrives from Lincare but nothing else.  That’s correct, no nutrition and no supplies to take care of the tubes.  Chamber’s has supplied me with the cleaning supplies to take care of my tubes and some syringes so that I can flush them, but now the Administrator of Chamber’s decides to call Lincare and my GI Specialist office to see why I still don’t have nutrition.  My GI Specialist has his nursing staff call Lincare about my nutrition.  Finally, on day four my nutrition arrives, so at this point I have actually been 5 days without any nutrition at all.  The nurse from Chamber’s comes out for her visit and gets my pump programmed and hooked up to my j-tube.  It did feel a little strange at first but it wasn’t painful.  I was still fairly sore from the surgery and the only time I was getting out of bed was to go to the bathroom.  At least that was my reasoning.  I don’t know if at first I was trying to convince myself of this or others around me.  What ever it was, my daughter and my best friend was letting me get by with staying in bed and taking care of my pump and tubes, for now.  My Home Health nurse was coming 3 times a week right after my surgery, she was there to answer any questions we had about the pump, feeding, tubes, wound site, or anything that we could think of that had to do with what I had just gone through.  It took my nurse and the administrator of Chamber’s 2 full weeks to get all of my things needed from Lincare and then they still didn’t have the proper connectors for my tubing to the syringe that I needed to flush my feeding and vent tube every 4 hours.  Fortunately, Chamber’s had a few of these that they could provide me.  I have had some other ordering issues later down the line, but that’s for another day.  I knew that my daughter and my best friend were getting ready to put a stop to me staying in bed 24 hours a day, but I didn’t know how I was going to function now.  My whole life was changed.  I was laying in that bed willing myself to die.  I wanted God to take me home because I knew it would be easier in the long run on everyone in my life.  This was it, this was it, this was what my life has come to.  I was in a long dark pit.  Who was ever going to love me like this? My daughter always left right after my best friend came home on Fridays, which is usually around noon.  About 2 weeks after my surgery, on a Friday, my daughter said, “Starting Monday, we are going to start teaching you how to take care of yourself, so be ready.”  I just said ok.  My body was was mended from the surgery and I knew it.   My brain was physically  able tell myself how to tend to my body, but mentally something wasn’t prepared for what was next.   I was anxious for Monday because I knew my daughter was serious; she was tired of watching me lay in bed.  I asked God to please show me a sign that I wasn’t on this journey for nothing and I waited; dreading Monday.

Psalms 23: 4 Even though I go through the darkest valley,

                      I fear no danger,

                      for you are with me:

                      Your rod and your staff- they comfort me.