anavelblack

[power-chords]

TW for people who have hospital-related trauma:

I am just stressed out, man. Yesterday I went to the hospital for visiting hours and spent 95% of my time there watching my husband writhe in pain in a chair and/or begging the powers that be to get him adequate pain treatment. I’m hesitant to even bitch because my experience of watching him be in pain is peanuts compared to what Adam himself went through yesterday, but it was so, so upsetting.

He was fine in the first 24 hours after surgery, because they had him hooked up to a drip and I think the remnants of the anesthesia were also taking some of the edge off. And then they switched him back to his standard pre-surgery oral dose of Dilaudid and he went from being at a 5 (manageable, what he has come to expect) to an 8. He was at a 7.5 when I showed up, and you could tell. Or at least I could tell. He’s not a yeller, even when the pain is extreme, but he was white as a sheet and squirming and rocking back and forth. He could barely speak to me. His vitals monitor was going nuts, because he’d hit 130, 140 BPM and sustain it for several minutes at a time (normal resting heart rate, as I understand it, is 60-100 in adult men). I never saw the monitor go below 120.

Nurses would come in and out, telling him that they were trying to get a dosage increase cleared with their supervisors because he’d had his last dose of Dilaudid less than an hour before I showed up. I tried to stress the urgency of the situation, that he might not be screaming, but “I know my husband, I have never seen him this bad,” etc, and they would continue coming in and out to tell us they were handling it, they were processing the request, and for TWO HOURS nothing was done. Visitors are prohibited from leaving the hospital room, but at one point I bolted to the main desk to implore somebody to do something and do it faster.

Finally, five minutes before they were due to give me the boot -- and I was just about ready to refuse to leave until I watched them give him something -- they approved the dose increase. They gave it to him in his IV and he settled down within minutes.

I cried when I got home, I was so angry. I’m still seeing red. Adam texted me recently to tell me that some of his nurses seemed angry, too. (Not their fault they can’t authorize medication changes without clearing it with brass.) I have no idea if this level of administrative dysfunction is common in hospitals, but letting someone contort themselves in agony for two whole hours, particularly when you have the ability to do something about it, is a form of torture. 

And if they had just communicated with us, if they had told me or him that the doctors were overrun and overwhelmed due to COVID, I would have forgiven them instantly. I would have just held his hand and kept my mouth shut. But I did not get the impression that this was the case. 

The good news is that he’s much more comfortable today, and they “took him off suction and now he’s just draining” which I guess means his chest cavity has healed enough that its post-surgery contents no longer need to be actively vacuumed out. His X-rays look fantastic, so fingers crossed he’ll be home on Wednesday and will never have to look at the inside of that building again.