My Post-surgery Hell (Part One)

I don’t use the word “Hell” lightly. In my last post, written two days before my back surgery, I said this procedure would be at least as extensive as my last surgery in 2002, which was a four-level spinal fusion in my lower back. The surgery was supposed to last about three hours.

Well, the surgeon opened me up and discovered my old hardware wasn’t compatible to the new, so he had to carefully remove the old spinal cage, and ended up fusing my entire spine, in what turned out to be a 10-level spinal fusion.

TEN…

My entire spine.

This also more than doubled the estimated three-hour surgery time. I was shocked to find out the procedure was more than seven hours long; so long, in fact, that my mother, who is wheelchair bound, couldn’t wait any longer and had to go home.

To compound the misery, the surgeon said the muscles had been wrapped around that crazy-crooked spine for decades. Thus, he also had to cut up all my stomach muscles, rearrange them around my newly-straightened spine and sew them back together. Even now, more than a month later, my stomach still feels as if someone has wrapped a huge, metal belt around it, a belt that is four sizes too small, and is pulling it tighter and tighter.

When I first woke up after the procedure, I was in a room full of others who had suffered various surgeries. I was feeling goofy and started to sing…and sing LOUD. I sang about half of the DC Talk song “Jesus Freak,” and couldn’t figure out why nobody in Recovery was singing along.

I got up to my room about an hour later and rambled on like a crazy person for a few minutes, until the anesthesia started to wear off. In five minutes I went from being the clown of the room to having a full-blown panic attack.

The first panic of my life, by the way. I couldn’t catch my breath and thought I was gonna die. I told my wife and kids, “It’s ok, I’m ready to meet Jesus! Don’t worry!”

That passed in about 10 minutes, and I finally began to settle down. Besides a pain in my entire spine so severe that, even as a writer, I can’t put into words, I noticed my shoulders and arms were numb, and were killing me. I asked the nurse about it.

She explained that my three-hour surgery turned into seven hours, and I was lying on my stomach with my arms folded under me the entire time.

And that’s when the hell began.

I was told I lost a whole liter of blood during surgery, and my blood pressure was dangerously low: 70/30 at one point. Because it was so low, they couldn’t give me pain pills for the first day and a half. This is because they feared the opioids may cause my pressure to plummet, which could potentially kill me.

So there I was, lying in a highly uncomfortable hospital bed, no pain medication, weak and dizzy from the loss of blood, and with a catheter. I can’t explain how miserable I was, honestly.

I was in the hospital for eight days. They removed my catheter, but too soon. I couldn’t urinate, and was told their policy is to insert two “in-and-out” catheters before reinsertion of a normal catheter. So in one miserable night they put in and pulled back out two “in-and-out” catheters and inserted one standard catheter.

I was also given a liter of blood, and my blood pressure finally raised to a safe enough level to begin pain killers and muscle relaxers. They helped a little, but I mostly just laid there, absolutely and utterly miserable.

Finding a comfortable position to lay was impossible, so I only slept two to three hours a day. I couldn’t seem to stop crying, and was told that was probably due to all the anesthesia, since I was out for over seven hours.

Yeah, I cried a LOT the first couple weeks.

Even though I felt I’d woke up in some type of sterile, white, hospital hell, I settled into my routine of crappy food and nurse attendants, until the doctor came in eight days after the surgery and unexpectedly said I was going home.

Fear immediately set in, and he could tell I was panicking a little. He said, “There’s nothing more we can do for you here that you can’t do at home. Let’s just rip the Bandaid off and do it! Let’s get you outta here!”

So I suffered a terribly painful ride home, and that’s where the real work began…

(Stay tuned for Part Two: Recovery)