my ordeal, an update on missing details

June 23, 2005

hey everyone,

Since I still get so tired I thought I would send the details in one

message instead of individual ones.

My surgery lasted 7 hours. I was in recovery for two hours and then

wheeled into my room for an interesting evening. Lets just say that

sometimes evening nursing/nursing assistant staffing is not always

adequate. Be sure you have a family member STAY THE NIGHT with you

in the hospital! Poor Dan was so exhausted from waiting for my

surgery to be over (it lasted 2 hours longer than scheduled) that I

felt sympathy for the poor man and sent him home to sleep.

needless to say I had to call him at home and have him come back.

The situation went something like this: I'd push the nurse call

button... " Can I help you " " I need huuuup " . The nurse assistant

came, I told her I needed pain meds " I huuuut, I tink it time for my

medssss " . She told me that I should expect some discomfort and

disappeared without resetting my call button. Mind you the phone in

my room did not work...I had to get out of bed...check all the wires

and fix the damn phone myself to make a call. Can you imagine a

collect call after jaw surgery?? " please state your

name " " 'SSSEEEFFF " " I'm sorry can you repeat that? " " SEEEEEF! "

All this just to get Dan to be my voice to ask for more morphine!

He came...god love him, and spent the night in the recliner.

I was released the next morning to my surprise and delight due to my

rocky night. This week has been rough. in 7 days I got less than 15

hours sleep. I kept having anxiety revolving around being completely

congested, having my jaws tightly banded shut and a retainer type

fixture (called a splint) taking up a lot of room in my mouth, as

well as a numb and swollen upper lip that I have no control over for

now. Lets just say that the brain plays tricks on you and you become

very scared that if you fall asleep you will forget to breathe or

that there is not enough room for the air to flow. So after several

days of no sleep the surgeon called me in for a checking on. He did

some x-rays and checking to prove to me that I was okay and gave

me " a little something " to get me through this rough patch. I got 14

hours of sleep yesterday. Thank the gods.

Later.

Steph

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