Tragic's Wake

There was a mishap with anaesthesia after my surgery. I’m not entirely certain just what happened but I’ll recount what I was told afterwards by a mix of family, friends, nurses, and my surgical team.. When discussing pain management; I had opted for the epidural method for immediate post-op because it has a faster healing rate and several other advantages over traditional opiate based pain management plus you remain lucid instead of morphine doped for days afterwards.

This particular anaesthesia mishap is common, it happens–the insertion slipped during the surgery and it froze the wrong places, that’s acceptable risk, I knew it was possible. I’m NOT upset with my surgical team or the anesthesiologist. Those things can happen. Nobody saw it because the slip happened under the surface inside the spinal area.. It froze my thighs instead of my abdomen. Bad bad BAD scene.

For the first 10+ hours post-op; I was completely non-medicated in ANY way. It was the most horrific experience I have ever gone through, they say that my particular type of surgery is probably the most painful post-op there is and so it’s vital that you have the proper pain management in place or you’ll be very very sorry, and I was.. Oh my gods I was.

I laid there howling until I tasted blood in my throat, there was NO sound left in my larynx, I was crying so hard that my eyes swelled shut.. I blacked out several times but Kylearyn said I was screaming for God and death and all kinds of shit and my surgeons were standing by my bed near tears. Nurses were fighting on the phone with O.R downstairs to have someone bring up some serious meds and O.R kept saying “He’s on his way up right now, we had an emergency, you’ll have to wait a few minutes but he IS coming” and they did that repeatedly but it was closer to 12 hours before they actually had a suitable drug in me.

My surgeon called down the final time and freaked because in any normal hospital in the country the nurse would be authorized to administer so long as the doctor RXd and signed off on it. Not here. Horizon Health has a tiered system; it takes no less than six people to initiate an IV line–different levels of staff to do each step.

Four surgeons in and out beside my bed, holding my hand and swabbing my face: all with hands tied because Horizon would have fired and sued any one that had acted. Dr A threw it all to the wind though, she threatened them and she reminded them that in a real hospital she would have not only had the right to RX me but she’d have been legally obligated. Someone finally snapped and screamed at her to damned well come and get it herself, which she did and they knocked me out with some hardcore shit that isn’t even supposed to leave O.R (( this is what I was told by a nurse, I may be wrong. )) but it was extenuating circumstances and technically I already had enough ammo to sue them dry.

I’ve blocked a lot of the experience itself, it was horrific and just wrong on so many levels. I can vaguely remember the stream of doctors and nurses who were in and out. I can remember the agony as I started to feel the pain down in recovery (you’re wheeled into recovery for the first hour or so after O.R just to stabilize and come too then they take you to your real room). I remember the confused faces as I told them that something was wrong, that I was hurting really bad. I remember that they seemed to take hours to get anyone to look at me while I was in recovery but I know it was barely minutes. I think they knew before they wheeled me to my room that something terrible had happened but they’re forced by Horizon to keep the beds rolling, I was sent to my room anyway.

They tried hooking me up to a PCD pump (( patient controlled delivery system, the little button that lets you give yourself a tiny mostly useless dose of drugs every 6 minutes. ))  with short dose Dilaudid but somehow nobody bothered to check my file, dilaudid is useless for me, it does nothing but make me sick unless it’s a big enough dose to knock me out completely and they weren’t allowed to do that so they started trying to get something else.. They kept testing the failed epidural all night too. I remember the nurses touching me with icy cold cloths and I remember that I could feel the coldness perfectly on my abdomen and my lower belly, it was my thighs that froze, dead numb. I felt every incision in my gut, I felt every suture. My intestines were doing their thing, moving like worms, intestines are continuously moving, and I could feel it. Every tiny twitch and all of those brand new slices. They knew, and there was nothing they could do.

Horizon and their bloody tiered system, the Saint John Regional Hospital was once a facility that filled our community with pride. We had a state of the art facility where we believed most anything was possible, we truly believed that you could go in there and no matter what was wrong with you, you’d eventually come out all better and ready to get back in the ring.

Now our hospital is staffed with doctors and nurses who aren’t allowed to do their jobs, who hate the Horizon system as much as the patients do, nobody wants to work here, the O.R is a joke and “patient care” in that place is just a memory of days long past. I heard the nurses chattering about how helpless they felt, I watched nurses and patient support workers run out in tears at shift change. I saw the way the staff is treated and how their hands are tied in regards to the patients and treatment regimes.

It’s chaos, it’s purgatory for the half dead, it’s hell for everyone involved.

I can’t tell you much more than this, the details that I do still have in my head make me nauseous and they make my throat swell and lock. I get tears when I think about it, I’ve been reliving it in my dreams at night. I can’t describe accurately what it felt like but this should help a bit–if I had known in advance that the epidural would fail, that I would be left nearly 12 hours with only supervision and no care or management at all–truthfully? I would have opted for death on the table, it honest to god hurt that fucking much (( the dreams and aftershock that I’m experiencing actually seems to fit the common symptoms for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I have serious anxiety issues and a touch of PTSD type symptoms already unrelated to this episode so I’ll refrain from idiot self-diagnosis for now)) .

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