CodeVerity

Ertl Amputation - Day Zero Part II

Thursday, June 12 2008 - health

Part one of day zero is here.

The actual amputation took just over 3 1/2 hours. Once the procedure was done Dr. Ertl (yeah the procedure is named after his grandfather) came down to the waiting room and spoke with Carol's mom and I. He was pleased with how the procedure went and joked that she now had muscle where she never had muscle before. He did express some concern about swelling around the muscle and decided "not to completely close the wound". He said when he looked at it in the morning he would make a decision about what to do next, but trying to close it now would have just shredded the sutures. He was confident it wouldn't be a problem because he had some "idea's" on how to deal with it.

Shortly after he left, saying that she would be in recovery for 30 minutes to an hour a nurse came down and asked me (and only me) to go with her. She said that Carol was asking for me and that they usually don't allow people in recovery but Carol was very insistent. When I got up there Carol was very agitated but not making a whole lot of verbal sense. She was signing, adamantly and the nurses were asking me to interpret. I laughed, given that my signing skills are almost nil. I did get "stop" and "yes" out of her and we figured out she was signing "pain". Carol always says signing is easier than speaking, something she proves whenever she has a few drinks because she starts signing a lot. This was the same type of thing. Her mind was foggy from the anesthesia but she was in a lot of pain and was trying to communicate that in the easiest way possible.

She kept asking me: "is it gone?" and "make it stop" and occasionally "I want to go home". It was tough trying to be there for her listening to that and not breaking down myself...

Once we figured out the problem the nurses gave her a couple of different pain meds and after a few minutes she settled down and became somewhat articulate. I spent about 40 minutes with her, while her mom waited downstairs completely unaware of what was going on. The nurses decided that she was too sedate to leave recovery [due to all the additional pain meds] and that it would be another hour or so. At that point I left and went back downstairs to tell her mom what was going on.

It was at least another hour before we asked about her and were told she would be moved to her room shortly. We walked across the street to the hospital wing and waited for her to show up. Unfortunately she didn't get a private room and the rooms themselves are very small. It was cramped after they got her bed in there.

Carol was looking far better than she did when I had last seen her. She was smiling again, though still experiencing a lot of pain. After a few hours she tried to sit up, which promptly made her sick. Around 30 minutes later she repeated getting sick. It wasn't much, but if it continued it would be a problem. The nurses gave her a couple of different meds for nausea and the last one apparently did the job.

She drifted in and out of sleep all afternoon. Occasionally she would suffer through massive bursts of pain. The worst one she described as feeling like her ankle was exploding. She surprised me a little when, before surgery, the doctor asked what her pain level was on a pain scale 1...10 and she said 6 1/2. That means she was typically at 6 1/2 on a good day at a good time, for the last 6 months at least... You would have never known it from her demeanor. I told her that once this is all done and the pain is gone if she becomes one of those obnoxiously happy people we might have to break up... [she laughed]. The target pain level, after the surgery, is a 4. She was at a 8 1/2 and trying not to take more meds because they were making her nauseous. Thankfully she got that taken care of and got the pain down some.

All things considered I think she came through it really well. Let's hope that tomorrow brings less pain and more recovery.

Before surgery

Nice ducks on those pants!

After surgery (still smiling)