The Odyssey & Gregorian Chanting – Part 5

Ok well, we’ve made it this far, we’re half-way home… I understand how painful it must be for all of you to have read this far – but in a way, it brings us closer together, my pain is your pain, and that’s a bond we can never sever.

Ok, today we’ll play the speed round, the previous posts have been on the longish side and today were going on a quick-hit, search and destroy to mix things up. Please fasten your seatbelts, ensure your tray tables and chairs are in the upright position and keep hands inside the car at all times…

For the sake of brevity, Chris will be using outrageous exaggeration to quickly create a mental picture in your minds-eye throughout todays post…. One thing about brevity, a lot of times people say they are going to be brief or really carve the message down to it’s most essential points, but in-turn what invariably ends up happening is that all brevity is lost because they get caught up in trying to explain things and the explanations are far more detailed than initially thought they would be and often it’s the details that are being expounded upon which artificially enlarge the document, plenty of adjectives and words which could easily be excised but aren’t that causes the distinct lack of briefness or brevity in which you were initially promised but which has instead turned out to not be very brief at all or even for that matter come close to approaching the brevity you were promised, so it is my intention to keep everything to only the facts an thusly ensure the brevity and concise economical use of language I had promised earlier when I said I would be brief and in so doing complete my initial task of adhering to my initial statement that today’s post would employ brevity………………………….     dammit, EPIC FAIL on brevity….

On with the show, Fever subsided – heart was tolerable, old lady/fake lumberjack wasn’t…. After the cardio team came by yesterday and the neuro team and the pain team…. I had a ton more pills to take, so in the morning the nurse gave me 2 – 50 gallon drums which contained my morning dose….

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So I took these all before breakfast about .004 seconds after waking up , roughly .00008 seconds after taking the pills I was shuddering with great waves of  Nausea, I’m not talking amateur nausea – I’m talking professional nausea, I’m talking, eating a bucketful of 3 week old fish heads that had been left in a high school gym locker, while standing on my head on a floating roller-coaster in rough seas, coming off a week long Tequila & Peach Schnapps bender…. NAUSEA! It felt like I was going to throw up and hard… I actually got scared I might heave so hard I would throw up the catheter…. I guess the nurse used some kind of ESP or maybe she just saw the particular shade of green I had turned and hurried over with some hypodermic and injected something in my IV and nearly instantly – it was gone, it was waaaay gone, I started looking for that bucket of fish heads I felt so good… after that we all decided to take my pills with food from now on…

Later that morning, the nurse told me she was going to remove the outside bandage dressings, and if it looked good they might leave them off, so the chest scar could dry. Great and give the flies a change to lay their eggs in my gaping wound no doubt…. weren’t bandages used for a reason, this wasn’t the civil war, I didn’t need to lie there with a sucking chest wound open for any tom, dick or harry, to flick his cigarette ashes in….. So I steeled myself for what I assumed would be painful and messy ordeal. She came over, gave me some pain meds and off we went, it wasn’t so bad, the large dressing came off fairly easily and for the first time I saw the hamburger, I mean my chest…

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So you can see I was pretty wide open there, the lighting was quite bad in this picture I look like a black man, so just go ahead and ignore that… Ok… alright I’m kidding that wasn’t me, I still had a tape dressing over the actual scar and the chest tube was still sticking out. The chest tube was quite a bit larger than I thought it would be, considering that it was a tube and it was in my chest….. see pic….

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Now again, I’m going to go with lighting issues because here I look slightly mexican or perhaps some other kind of swarthy chap. Ha, Ha, Ha, LOL, OK, kidding again, you can tell this isn’t me because we do our hair differently… I don’t have any pictures of the chest tube, but it really is a tube, sticking out of your chest, somehow when you cough and breathe deeply it creates a negative pressure in your chest and the excess fluid and junk flows into the tube and it can be suctioned out, better out than in I suppose, but it is odd-looking down and seeing this tube sticking out of your chest and knowing that it is just sitting there, IN you. Although it was slightly smaller than what my man above has sticking out of his chest it still looked and felt huge. The nurse promised me a lot of my pain would disappear almost instantly when the chest tube was removed. I guess it keeps banging up against your innards every time you move and that is what caused much of the pain. She lied. She also said it wouldn’t hurt coming out. She lied again.

The liar and another nurse came over with a bunch of stuff and brought a cart with them, full of still more stuff, like they were getting prepared just in case this went poorly, not a confidence booster. One nurse got on the bed and I thought HELLO, showtime! Alas, twas not to be she kneeled on my left side and the other nurse was on my right. The nurse kneeling over me, grabbed hold of the tube, the other nurse grabbed hold of my skin and I was told to breathe deep 3 times, the first two were normal ins and outs – the third breath, on the exhale I was to say wheeeeee as loud as I could, no lie. First breath in and out, second, in and out, third, in and wheeeeeeee… the kneeler, yanks the tube completely out and the other nurse pinches the sweet mother Jesus out of the hole and pulls tight the stitches that had already been inserted by the surgical team, just not tightened until now. Oh my God it hurt, and they both get off and say see that wasn’t so bad was it….. I woke up 3 hours later….

It did feel better having it out, but not for a bunch of hours, and the fact that I had minimal epidural all played a part, once the tube was out, they told me later in the afternoon the SWAT pain guys would come by and remove the epidural. Once the epidural was out they would also remove the catheter. Bloody hell there was a lot of removing going on…. The less foreign bodies in me the better, so onward and upwards. Once the chest tube was out, there was nowhere for the junk to drain anymore, only by coughing and spitting….. I believe I have covered how much coughing sucked, but now it was even more mandatory than before. So I was playing around with ways to cough without really coughing and then I stumbled upon my greatest invention ever, the Hum-cough (patent pending) If I did a little teeny-weeny cough followed by a hum, the stuff coming up was so thick the cough would get it close and the hum carried enough breath to expel the crud. Just coughing alone, well you had to cough quite hard to expel, so the gentle cough followed by the hum seemed to work. The only down side, you had to hum and NOONE was humming, so you ended up sounding slightly demented with this cough followed by a borderline Gregorian chant. The Gregorian Chant sort of fit, because I was already wearing the robes….

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Tomorrow actual pictures, and the removal of the catheter – plus some other nonsense…. so much for the brevity.

Have a Great Day.