Mind of a Liver Donor : Post-Op

Day 1.
After about the 40th adjustment of the bed, comfort remained elusive. I pulled myself up to sit down, it being too painful to be lying down. Every minute there was a conscious echo of the man who had rightly told me what to expect … “pain.” Including this pain, so much has been unfamiliar to me ever since that white pill. Everything I had expected and prepared became wishful thinking of a naïve med student being overrun by this reality.

After this major blind-siding, I thought back to how all the information and worry directed towards me had bounced off the shield of ‘knowledge’. One systematic review article had made me into an expert in liver transplants, that expertise was maintainable when the topic was of someone else. But, once I lay in the same bed I had scoffed at…. I really had no idea.

My abdomen feels exactly as it should. Like a surgeon cut open a wound, took out the right lobe of my liver, took out my gall bladder and reconnected the many blood vessels and ducts of my liver. I push the button to inject my body with more of some weak PVC crap instead of morphine that’s had minimal effect since this afternoon. A steady flow of it enters into my neck – I know because I can taste it along with my IV drips for nutrition. I know biologically I shouldn’t be able to, but I can’t escape the feeling like the insides of my mouth has been covered with an IV tasting layer of glad wrap.

My drained strength kept me from opening eyes to see and talk to the many visitors who had come in to wish a speedy recovery. Every visitor seemed to be compelled say those exact same words with a string of other cliché lines. They made no attempt to hide the repetition of the line, either because it was easier to slip into a role they’ve already seen or because it really best expressed how they feel.

Is it that we have lived long enough with the English language that everything has already been expressed? Our confessions of love, words of encouragement, jokes for the laughs, sympathetic phrases… How much of it was original? How much of it could be?

There seems to be another thing about pain, it makes me make half-hearted stabs at philosophy.

Day 2.
Today, I exceeded my limit. At 3 a.m. my body was drenched in the sweat of exasperation. I grasped at the bedrails and on my way up, ironically I snapped and fell way down in my head. Pain had been too much part of my life for too long, and I cried both out and literally. I shocked myself, I had been keeping everything under the lid just 5 minutes earlier, and with a short passage of time I was begging to be helped from it all.

Pain had become my Michael Jackson.

Those kids who went to Neverland, would’ve laughed at the aspect that he liked his kids a little too much. When they get there, they find that the giraffe’s neck is not the only stiff rod in the zoo of a house, and after the consequential relief of the stiffness to the horror of the children, they will be rewarded with a multi-million dollar lawsuit. False expectations – harsh reality – great reward.

So, going back to the crumbling me, my mother ran out to yell for a nurse. They arrived with a painkiller, and injected a large dose into my veins. The relief was almost instantaneous, and just as I was thinking medicine was a miracle, the catch of medicine kicked the wind out of me, literally. It felt as if some douchebag smashed me over the head then stuck two fingers down my throat making me nauseous, vomittus (wanting to vomit – don’t look this term up in the dictionary though… I made it up) and unable to breathe.

A hurried oxygen tank ended the day for me. It’s actually worth it to have the douchebag do what he did, because it relieved me from what the surgeon did. The side-effects of the opioids wore off in less than 30 minutes, giving me hours of doped-up joy and sleep.

Day 3.
Did you notice the lack of the mentioning of the person who all of this is for? I couldn’t escape the self-absorption of this particular suffering to muster a sustaining concern for my dad. The resident surgeon had told me earlier that the liver donor hurts more than the liver recipient – not because we really hurt more than the receiver, but because the amount of pain relief medication is just that comparably different.

The nurses here have 3 different pain medication at their disposal at this hospital. My body had side-effected to the one yesterday, and it decided to reject the other 2 with a worse reaction to one, and a loss of the relief to the other that had successfully worked on Day 1.

I had done my summer studentship (a research project) on pain. During the literature review, research revealed the harm of pain and exposed some dire long-term consequences – it was no longer about toughing out the moment and believing in the benefits of getting better on your own. My brain had been the only one absorbing all this information whereas my body still seemed to believe one thing. “Harden up mate.”

Fine, no more pain medication. No more blogging about it either. Instead I’ll make the rest of my stay at the hospital into a list.

Days spent at the hospital: 11
Days I wished I wasn’t at the hospital: 3 (Hospital intrigue could only take me so far, plus by Day 8 I had explored every nook and cranny of the 3 building complex available to the public).
Days I was promised discharge but stayed with fluid leakage from the liver: 1
Days with a lot of pain: 3
Times I wake up at night sweating from the discomfort since Day 4: 3
Injection holes in my arm: 14
Injection holes in my neck: 3
8x4cm bruise from poor injecting skills: 1
Loss of reserve inspiratory capacity (Max volume of air inspirable after maximum expiration): 1200mL
Regain of that loss: 900mL (With exercise)
IV fluid entered into my body: 5L
Peak no. of IV drips simultaneously: 4
Dad’s peak no. of IV drips simultaneously: 9
Staple holes in my abdomen: 48
Staples pulled out of my abdomen with me looking: 24
Blood pouches draining my abdomen: 2
cm of tube pulled out of my abdomen: 50
cm of tube I wanted to watch getting pulled out of my abdomen: 50
cm of tube I actually watched: 15
cm of tube pulled out of my nose: 10-15
No. of CT scans: 1
No. of Hepatobiliary scans: 1
No. of X-rays: 4
Kilometres walked: 25 (Exercise is recommended from Day 2 onwards, becoming especially important from Day 4 onwards to reactivate the GI tract)
Times those kilometres got me in trouble: 2 (Both times from venturing into ICU)
Kilometres walked wishing that I had a Mp3 player : 24.9
Minutes spent with a Doctor: 20 (That’s over the 10 day span, including a 10 minute session obtaining consent before surgery. This did change somewhat on the last day when the resident doctor opened up a little bit.)
Days spent by my resident surgeon in the hospital: 5
Metres walked by that doctor on his venture into fresh air: 10
Hours slept on a daily basis by the same doc: 1 (Completely ridiculous the workload the doctors are under over here.)
Words I wish I had the opportunity to say to a Doctor: A summarised 200
Number of verbal consent asked by the Doctor: 0 (I remember a time when a doctor shook me awake, and before I could shake off the grog, she was already busy removing my IV drip needles from my neck)
Times spent bent forwards washing my hair wishing I was having a shower instead: 6
Times I had a shower: 0
No. of beautiful of nurses: 6
No. of beautiful radiologists: 1

So concludes the mind of a liver donor.