nixsight

On Thursday, I went into hospital for a not-that-long-awaited operation. I don’t know what the long-term financial viability of the NHS outsourcing operations to private hospitals is, but I, for one, applaud it – roughly three months from knowing that I was definitely going to need the op, to having it. Not bad.

The operation was called a Septoplasty. There was more to it then that, but I can’t remember the rest, and it’s not really important. I’ve simply been describing it to people as being attacked in the nose with a chisel. Course, I thought I was joking.
Luckily, I hadn’t thought to look the operation up online, otherwise I’d have realised that I wasn’t. Also, I might have thought twice about it.

Do a Google video search on septoplasty if you don’t believe me.

The septoplasty was to fix my deviated septum, as explained at Wikipedia. This was the latest step in a year and a half long process of trying to stop my snoring, and we won’t know whether or not it’s worked for a few weeks, but if you and your partner have ever had to sleep in seperate rooms, and, you know, you like them, you’ll know that it was absolutely something we had to try.

Girl One and I arrived by taxi at the hospital at around midday on the 28th. The paperwork had said to arrive at 12, and suggested that the operation might occur at around 3pm. The plan was to check out at 10am on Friday, which meant an overnight stay.

I probably haven’t mentioned it before, but I love staying in strange beds, like in hotels and such. I don’t know whether it’s the novelty, or just the idea that there are people being paid to look after me, but I’ve always had kind of a fetish for it. I’ve only ever stayed in hospital once before, but this was a private hospital, and things were a little different. I was in my own room, with an en suite bathroom, and a tv, and everything. It was ace.

The hospital had asked that there be someone at home when I got back the following day, to look after me, but Girl One wanted to make sure I was settled and okay on arrival, too, so had taken both Thursday and Friday off, as if I didn’t already know how awesome she was. She sat with me while a nurse explained the schedule for the day, and I got myself into my gown. She also explained the hospital’s Pain Score, a 0-to-10 scale that staff and patients use as a quick reference for how things are going. 0 would be, I suppose, the lack of pain you’d associate with drinking water. 10 would be how you’d feel drinking broken glass. While being kicked in the nuts. By an elephant.

After a while, the anaesthetist and surgeon took turns coming in and explaining what they were going to be doing. Both were exceptionally handsome chaps; the anaesthetist was cool and collected, while the surgeon was quite animated and friendly. I tried not to read anything into the fact that he kept distractedly dropping his pen on the floor, a fact that Girl One noticed as well, I was later amused to hear.

Then it was a matter of waiting. Both the surgeon and the nurse had told us that there were a few people in for surgery today, and that a few of them were children, who the surgeon tended to prefer to do first. I don’t think I’d realised that surgery didn’t run to a more defined schedule, but I’m easy going about such things. However, on doctor’s orders, I hadn’t eaten since the previous evening, and hadn’t had anything to drink since early that morning, so as noon came and went, I started to get quite distracted.

Apparently, the only things that they put on afternoon telly are food programmes and news reports about killer hospital bugs. The news about Prince Harry in Afganistan was actually a welcome interjection.

At around 3 or 4, I convinced Girl One that she didn’t have to stay. It was selfish, really, and I felt bad about it afterwards, but I was starting to get fidgetty, and knew that I wouldn’t be able to relax or have a nap if I was worried about her getting bored or worried. It felt weird, thinking about her making her way out of the hospital by herself, but soon after she had gone, a nurse came in and suggested that I might not be operated on until early evening, so it was just as well. I read a bit of my book, tried not to think about the hunger pangs, and drifted in and out of sleep.

This went on till around 9, and my nurse for the evening, a lovely agency nurse who didn’t know the hospital much better than I did, had said that she still hoped I’d be seen to that night, which was slightly unnerving, because until then I hadn’t considered that I wouldn’t be! I’d already missed lunch and dinner, so was starting to feel a little starving and thirsty.

Around half 9, though, things started to happen, and by 10, a nurse in a different coloured uniform came and walked me along a couple of corridors to the room where I was to be anaesthetised.

She was an attractive, petite lady, probably in her forties, and she kept me talking while she got me on the bed, applied the sensor pads to track my vitals, and we waited for the anaesthetist from earlier to arrive. When he did, he and the nurse worked together to raise the veins on the back of my left hand, and he warned that what he was going to do might sting a little. The nurse rubbed my shoulder while he found the vein with the needle, and inserted a tube.

It was at most a 3 on the pain scale. The nurse told me, half-joking I think, to think of a happy place to dream about while I was under, and all I could think about was being at home with Girl One and the pup. I said so, and acknowledged that it was sappy, but she didn’t hear me, and as I repeated the assertion of sappiness, the room blurred in on me to a point, and all I could feel was the fingers on my shoulder.

And I think I dreamt, or not. And five minutes later, I came to again.

Course, it was longer than that. I’d been under for around an hour. I was in a different room, the Recovery Room, and I think a shift change had happened while I was out, because most of the people around me were new. I was aware of someone in another bed near me, before the curtain came round me.

I was quite surprised by how suddenly and completely I came round. Normally, when I’ve been sleeping, I take ages to come about, but it felt as if I was suddenly alert this time. My nose felt totally blocked, but otherwise comfortable, probably more down to the painkillers I’d been given then the gauze that crammed my nostrils closed.

At around midnight, I was back in my room, trying to eat a ham and mustard sandwich that a nurse had managed to find for me. I managed it, but it wasn’t easy, because the bandage under my nostrils, and the tightness of the tape holding it in place, severely limited my movement. As well, I hadn’t realised how close to my nose my food must normally get. And of course, swallowing wasn’t easy, when you’re not used to breathing solely through your mouth. Every gulp, of food and water, sucked against the inside of my nostrils, too, and made me worry that I might dislodge the fine work that I had been assured the surgeon had done.

And then, to be honest, came the hard part. I’d already been told that the gauze would be removed at 6 the following morning, and I was exhausted, so I didn’t think those hours would be hard to get through. But despite the lack of pain, I couldn’t seem to get comfortable, and it seemed like I couldn’t get more then a few minutes of sleep before the dreadful dryness of my mouth woke me up again.

By the time the nurses came in at around half 6, my tongue felt like it had dried out completely, and when I rubbed it against the roof of my mouth, that felt like old leather.

Before going at the deep-packed gauze, one of the nurses used a small syringe to squirt saline throughout my nose, around the material. Although the slightly salt liquid filled my mouth from the inside, and dribbled out into the bowl that the other nurse held under my chin, it was the nearest thing I’d felt to moist, despite the endless glasses of water I’d drunk during the night.

The relief was short-lived, though, because then she had at the gauze. What had felt like two irritating, but ultimately quite small wads of cotton crammed into the bottom of my nose actually felt like several inches long pieces of rope, coiled deep in my head. Admittedly, as she slowly pulled first one, then the other, out of me, I only ever peaked at around 5 on the pain scale, but the discomfort outweighed the pain, as despite the saline, it felt like the gauze had lightly velcroed itself to the recently aggravated tissue inside, and it felt like she was dislodging vital parts of me up there. I could feel it in my throat – the nearest sensation I can equate it to is finding a piece of hair in your eye, and as you pull on it, you realise it’s longer then you thought, and under your eyelid.

It was gross, and I said as much, but with a smile on my face. I don’t mind discomfort so much. There’s a certain relief in getting through it.

And that was that. The surgeon came in for a debrief, and then I had a slow morning, taken up with breakfast, and a new nurse who came in and changed my dressing. Although I was due to leave at 10, she didn’t hurry me, and eventually a caterer came round with a BLT sandwich for my lunch, before the nurse returned with my meds, my painkillers and nose-spray to take me through the next couple of weeks.

In the taxi on the way back home, the taxi driver didn’t comment on the sanitary towel of gauze rolled up and taped into place under my nose. Some non-troversy seemed to be flaring up on the radio, about a Lord who had made a statement in the House of Lords about NHS nurses basically being worthless, loose tarts.

I didn’t think it was a particularly helpful point of view. The setting and conditions at the hospital I’d just had my operation in were a good deal nicer and tidier then at the NHS hospitals I’d been to in the run up to this op, but the staff, with the exception of the odd cranky receptionist in the NHS, have been pretty much excellent at all of them.

Since getting home, Girl One has been looking after me wonderfully, and Anya has been a good puppy, only once trying to eat my bloody nose off. The gauze pad is no longer taped under my nose, but the bastard thing is running constantly, and I now have two weeks of worrying about forgetting to be careful, and knackering the whole operation.

So, anyway, that was my run up to the weekend… how was yours?