Boberetezeke Speaks

It is Wednesday April 7th. I feel fairly good right now. It has almost been a week since my surgery. It has been a fairly rough road so far, but as recoveries from surgery go, probably it has gone real well. I am just not used to recovering from surgery.

The surgery I had is called a Nissen Fundoplication. In pre-op, the nurse wrote on the white board in my room, “Nissan Fundiplication” which is something like exchanging your car our for a new Nissan. Wikipedia has a good description of the procedure. The point of which is to stop acid from going up into my esophagus. Unfortunate side effects are that you also can’t burp to let gas out of your stomach anymore and you can’t vomit (but hey who vomit’s very often? — that will be a pleasure when I can experience that). Also, there is no undo button. It is permanent.

My issue was that for about the last 16 months, it has felt like I either had a persistent lump in my throat or a sore throat all the time. Every day I woke up, it was there. It was very disheartening. But it wasn’t anything that required surgery. The surgery was elective. So it took me a while to decide that I was going to have it. I tried every acid reflux medication out there and finally took the dive.

It all started with Angie and I waking at 4:00am to get to the Fairview University Hospital (the girls were on their own that morning) at 5:40am to get prepped for surgery at 7:40am. As part of that, I had a long talk with the surgeon (Dr. Michael Maddaus) where we talked about what the surgery and recovery would be like and whether I wanted to go ahead with it. There was no pressure. But I just said “lets go!” and signed the consent form. I remember being wheeled into the operating room, and looking up at the lights and then… waking up in the recovery room with a sore abdomen and a more sore set of shoulders. I was expecting the sore abdomen but not the sore shoulders. The shoulder pain was a result of them pumping my abdomen full of CO2 which then worked its way out of my body through my shoulders. Someone said that maybe it was like getting the bends.

The first day of recovery consisted of laying in bed sucking on ice chips. Luckily I was able to get up take my “Patient Pal” (which was my IV holder) and go to the bathroom. They gave me pain killers (Dilaudid) through the IV.

The pain killers were a bit of a disappointment. I guess that I was expecting a little bit of a “high” from them. I had never been on a narcotic before (no heroin for me) and though at least it would be interesting. The doctor said that I was on a pretty low dose of it. I guess I should have complained of more pain. Oh well. All it did was take the edge off of the pain. Other people I know have gotten a little silly on post-operative pain killers, but not me.

The first night was a real fun episode, with them waking me up at 11:00pm, 12:00am, 2:00am, 4:00am and 7:00am. Not that I was sleeping that well anyway. The 7:00am visit by a set of doctors (neither of which did the surgery) was particularly nice as they woke me up to ask how I was doing and left 30 seconds later. The nursing staff was really great. They were all very nice, responsive and attentive. I can’t say enough about how well I felt I was treated. Maybe it helped that I wasn’t much trouble, but my room-mate (I’ll get to that later), was also treated quite well.

On the second day of recovery, I started on a clear liquid diet, which meant: broth soups, apple or cranberry juice and jello. Num! Things kept going well except for finding comfortable sleeping positions. Reading was out for the most part as I found that I really couldn’t concentrate on a book. So I spent a fair amount of time avoiding the Food Channel and watching Soccer.

By the third day, I got a visit from the surgeon and we agreed that it was going well and that I could go home. As I progressed, I got rid of the oxygen sensor on my finger, I started walking the hallways at the hospital, I got a neat pair of hospital pants, and I got the IV removed in a somewhat bloody mess by a student nurse.

Since coming home it was still hard to concentrate on much of anything other than eating my broth and jello and doing some reading. I didn’t turn on my computer until Monday which is pretty unheard of for me (6 days without a computer). The last couple of days, I have progressed to some soft foods like scrambled eggs, cottage cheese, buttered white toast, poached eggs. That come non too soon as I was feeling like if I had to eat another cup of broth I was going to vomit (which I can’t, so I didn’t want to do that).

My only concern now is that I still have a lump in my throat. Hopefully it will go away with time. If nothing else, this surgery has protected my esophagus from acid reflux which can eventually cause esophageal cancer (which I REALLY don’t want to get).

And about my room-mate… he made me feel very small for feeling at all sorry about myself. In a semi-private room (or really, not at all private room), I couldn’t help but hear everything about his condition. The only thing that I didn’t know was his full name.

I learned that he was 33 and had had cancer for 6 years. He now had a tumor in his lung that pressed onto his spine. It made him extremely uncomfortable to sit in any ordinary chair or even in a hospital bed. He was in my other half of the room because he had been in for an endoscopy because of some swallowing issue and during that they discovered that he had a tear in his esophagus and that food had been ending up in a cavity off to the side of it.

He and his wife had to then make the decision if they wanted to perform some sort of surgery to try and repair that tear or have him never eat solid foods again. So they decided to have this surgery where there were using a stent somehow to block the hole. It wasn’t even clear to my neighbors how this worked. His wife mentioned that this complication was completely unexpected and probably a result of radiation on the tumor that didn’t even work.

As I left the hospital, I wished them hope for the future and his wife basically said thanks but she didn’t have any left. They probably had been married for a couple of years and then he got cancer and that became their life. How tragic is that?

That’s all for now.