KONZUKO

Okay, so surgery day two.
This is the next day after the surgery, and in my past experience, well let me, yeah, in my past experiences, what’s happened is when I had the emergency surgery, I spent a whole day just sleeping, literally 20 hours, more than 20 hours.
Maybe I’d wake up a bit and then go back to sleep because I just didn’t have the energy.

But with this one, the turnaround and the pace that they were trying to move was really quick.
So the next day they’re on the ward, all the doctors and the people who come.
And a reminder, it’s what, 6:30am every single bloody morning.

They turn on the lights in the hospital, on the ward, so they go off at, usually they should go off at about 10pm at night, and then everyone starts preparing for bed.
But it depends, sometimes the nurses will leave it on until midnight and then before they turn it off.
But no matter what happens, the light always comes back on at 6:30, latest 7am if you’re lucky.

Because they just decided to, I don’t know, give people a bit more time or for whatever reason, or they just forgot to turn it on yet because they’re still doing their rounds and helping patients.
And then, for some people, the doctors will see them at 8am.
For me, that was rarely the case, usually it was later on in the day, sometimes in the early afternoon.

But it’s, you know, that 8, 9, 10am point is when the doctors, every day usually, they’ll come and do their rounds, and they’ll see different people.
Because in the ward, there’ll be people, it won’t, not necessarily everyone will be there for the same thing.
So, mine was a laparoscopy, anastomosis, this abdomen surgery on my intestine.

There was over, there’s different types of people, some, a bunch of them who were getting similar types of surgery as me.
Hemicolectomies, different sides.
But there were other people who were there, there was an old guy who was there for something else entirely, and he pretty much couldn’t move.

This guy was over 65, I reckon, I never actually saw him because he couldn’t, he wasn’t mobile, he couldn’t move from his bed.
And the doctors visit you, so they visit me.
And that day two after the surgery, they’re like, okay, so now a reminder, I’ve come up the surgery, I have the catheter in my cock, this helps you, you know.

I have the morphine PCA, PCA, was it PCN?
One of those, that pump in my shoulder, so the needles in my shoulder, I guess they couldn’t find a more adequate place.
That’s giving me the morphine pain relief.

I have a central line in my neck, which they can use to take bloods and give you medication.
But a central line is different to a PICC line.
A central line is meant to be more short term, you know, 10 days.
A PICC line is meant to be for longer, say a month.

Then I was meant to have, did I have a blood, somewhere for blood, blood tests?
I can’t remember.
I think I didn’t at that time.
Somewhere, a proper normal cannula, this is what I’m talking about.

Did I have a normal cannula?
Did I?
I didn’t.
They just used the central line.
And then the one thing I didn’t have, which was surprising, was an NG tube, nasal gastro tube, which I’ve always had in the past.

They’ve always put it in during surgery.
And there’s a reason why they do that.
I’ll get into it later, but I didn’t have that, which was unusual.

So the doctors come around eventually.
And they’re like, okay, we’re going to get the catheter taken out today, which I was so surprised.
Usually they try to leave it for even one additional day.

I was like, what?
You’re going to take it out now?
And we’re going to take away the PCA pump today as well.
We’ll give you normal pain relief.

I’m really concerned at this point, because even though the pain isn’t that bad from the surgery, it’s there and you can feel it.
So if you don’t have the morphine pump, it can be not that great.
And so you need to be on top of your pain relief, getting it on time.
And it’s just not as good as the morphine.

That’s just a fact.
But he’s insisting because, you know, the morphine slows down your bowel, apparently.
And the sooner you can get off of it, the better.

In the past, these guys did this weird thing where they gave me an ultimatum where it was, we will only take the catheter out if you get off the morphine first.
And I was telling them this, this is what they used to do.
And he was like, what?
We’re not going to do that.

We’re just gonna just do what we need to do and take the catheter out and take off the morphine.
And so this is all the first steps to recovery, right?
And what they, at this point, you’re still in bed, pretty much.
You can’t walk.

You haven’t brushed your teeth since the surgery, since you came out of the surgery.
But yeah, this is where you are.
And you’re not drinking, you’re not drinking or eating anything.

You’re nil by mouth still, because your, what’s it called, your bowel is asleep, pretty much.
Because the general anesthestic stops bowel motility
but you don’t want your bowel to start digesting stuff and moving stuff through when it’s not healed yet.

But then also, you may also have an ileus, which I’m not going to go into.
This will be explained, okay?
I’m not going to double explain this to myself.
I know what that is.

Postoperative ileus is a transient cessation of coordinated bowel motility after surgery, resulting in the inability to tolerate oral intake or pass stool or gas. It is a physiological response to surgical trauma. you get surgery, so your body says no.

And so you’re nil by mouth.
You can’t have anything, which is odd.
So they can give you, they’re giving you fluids.

And with the central line, eventually they can give you, The TPN, the perineal nutrition, which is literally all the nutrients you need to survive as a human being.
“Enteral” nutrition is delivered through a tube to your stomach. “perineal” means “outside of the digestive tract. But in this liquid form, and they just give it, and they leave it on.
They have to leave you connected 24 hours a day, because you need, if they disconnected, there’s the chance of infection.

And then you literally have this, they always give the perineal nutrition, the PM, through your neck.
It’s not perineal, it’s parenteral nutrition.
I’m retarded.

And they give it to you either through your neck in the central line or through the PICC line, either one.
And so that line goes down, connected to your heart.
But that, I haven’t had yet.

And they give it to me later down the line.
But what they do do is, so they take out the catheter.
Let’s see, did they take it out on day two or day three, I think.

We waited for a bit.
And then day three, they took out the catheter.
Okay.

And that day is when another nurse I know, a family member, started helping me and came to the hospital and was helping me do stuff like have bed baths and all this.
And this turns out to be a really important thing in hindsight, because really these nurses with the current NHS situation, they were seriously overworked.
And in hindsight, she was a big factor in my recovery and helping me do certain things like go and have a shower, helping me walk in the initial stages.

Because the other nurses were always so busy, they couldn’t really give me that one on one time.
They couldn’t really nurse me back to health.
It was literally her on her breaks in hospital, the person who’d come over and help me with all these things.

Which is kind of mad if you think about it, because not everyone, no one else had that.
How many people had a nurse who’s a family member coming in on their break, almost every day to help them do stuff, especially at the most difficult times, which is sort of near the beginning.
So this is on day three, and I get the catheter taken out and the morphine pump removed.

And I thought it would hurt.
It would sting because getting the catheter taken out last time it really stung, but it was fine.
It wasn’t that bad at all.

It’s just weird, kind of weird, you know, because the nurse looks at your cock and then she pulls the tube out of your cock and then she’s like looking at you while she does it and it’s all a bit weird.
Yeah.
And so after that happened, it must have been pretty shortly after my nurse came, my family friend, and she was helping me.

And this is when she helped me get out of bed and start having a shower.
And this was when the catheter had just been removed.
So this had, and this is what