"No surgery for you! You come back one week!"
I showed up for my scheduled surgery today with my pain very near a 10/10, having to lie on the love seat we found in the waiting room with my head on Brent's lap until, thankfully, they got us back to peri-op rather quickly.
Yadda, yadda, yadda, I answered all the questions I've been answering again and again and again and again. Really, what's the point of calling the day before and answering these questions with an RN if you just have to do it when you get there, any way.
Yes, I had a cough and Dr. L. was aware of it. No, no fever with the cough, just the cough. All the kids have had the same thing.
The student nurse goes to take my vitals and my temp is 100.5° (it normally runs in the low 97s.) I tried to rationalize that it was dehydration, since I hadn't been able to drink anything in, what was then, going on 14 hours. Brent also reminded me that I hadn't had any narcotics in my system for more than 12 hours: the first time my body had been in that situation in almost certainly more than I month.
The student nurse hears "crackles" (actually "wheezes," but I'll cut him a break-lung sounds are difficult to learn!) in my mid-lower lobes of my right lung. He has the RN listen and she hears some expiratory wheezes in the mid-lobe.
Next thing I know, the surgeon is ordering a chest x-ray. I'm feeling hotter. Thank goodness I just swallowed my pride and took a w/c down to radiology, b/c I don't know that I would have made it without great effort if I had had to walk, I hurt so bad.
I always try to sneak a peak at the x-rays when the techs check them out to make sure they don't need to do them over and I saw shit in my mid-right lung. FUCK! You see, if I can pick up on something like that from across a room by simply glancing, it's not good, as I am the worst x-ray reader in the world. Fact of the matter is: I'm not supposed to read x-rays or be able to read x-rays. A broken bone is lot different than pneumonia, too. A broken bone is obvious, even to lay persons, if they're pointed out. But I was always the one who, when they had x-rays of "normal lung" and "lung with infiltrates" side by side in a text-book, I could sit for hours and not find a difference in them. Part of that may simply have been they were both obviously two different people and so their anatomy was different, and that would throw off what I was looking at/for in the "pictures."
I pretty much knew, staring across that x-ray room that my surgery was off; that somehow I now had pneumonia. Granted, I have been coughing my head off, but the cough suppressant I had been taking had been working so well and, as I said, I hadn't had a fever until just them in peri-op. What a time for all this to happen! I also was having a very weird sensation of "bubbling up" in my throat of mucous, esp. after coughing, though I am not coughing anything up, I knew there was shit down there that would have liked to be loosened up a bit. (I have only actually let myself "cough stuff up" twice in my life and both times were an accident and both times I nearly vomited. Mucous doesn't bother me so much with other people, 'cept those little babies and toddlers who run around with green slime constantly fucking dripping from their nostrils and they wipe it all over their faces and into their eyes and shit with their sleeves or bare hands. The weird "bubbling up" sensation cause enough worry last night that I meant to have Brent grab my stethoscope for me so I could hear if I noticed anything "bad" while breathing, as I was starting to get paranoid.
And rightly so. The radiologist looked at the films, determined there to be infiltrates (a fancy way of saying pneumonia) in the mid lobe (rt. lung). Surgery was canceled. I was heartbroken. I have no words for how sad I was. I just cried. Even though I knew the news that was coming when the RN came in to tell me I cried.
The bad thing/s: Well, obviously I have pneumonia, which isn't good, but at least there's medicine for that! Other bad thing is I will now have to endure another 8 days of pain before we can begin to get this solved. It will be even longer before I can go to work since surgery has been delayed. Grrr.....
The good thing/s: My doctor is nice enough that he is giving up half of his day off the day after Thanksgiving to come in special and do the surgery for me, therefore making me only have to wait a week and a day instead of two weeks minimum before surgery. I get to go see BNL in concert on Sunday without worry of whether I'd be in the hospital or not! YAY!
Yadda, yadda, yadda, I answered all the questions I've been answering again and again and again and again. Really, what's the point of calling the day before and answering these questions with an RN if you just have to do it when you get there, any way.
Yes, I had a cough and Dr. L. was aware of it. No, no fever with the cough, just the cough. All the kids have had the same thing.
The student nurse goes to take my vitals and my temp is 100.5° (it normally runs in the low 97s.) I tried to rationalize that it was dehydration, since I hadn't been able to drink anything in, what was then, going on 14 hours. Brent also reminded me that I hadn't had any narcotics in my system for more than 12 hours: the first time my body had been in that situation in almost certainly more than I month.
The student nurse hears "crackles" (actually "wheezes," but I'll cut him a break-lung sounds are difficult to learn!) in my mid-lower lobes of my right lung. He has the RN listen and she hears some expiratory wheezes in the mid-lobe.
Next thing I know, the surgeon is ordering a chest x-ray. I'm feeling hotter. Thank goodness I just swallowed my pride and took a w/c down to radiology, b/c I don't know that I would have made it without great effort if I had had to walk, I hurt so bad.
I always try to sneak a peak at the x-rays when the techs check them out to make sure they don't need to do them over and I saw shit in my mid-right lung. FUCK! You see, if I can pick up on something like that from across a room by simply glancing, it's not good, as I am the worst x-ray reader in the world. Fact of the matter is: I'm not supposed to read x-rays or be able to read x-rays. A broken bone is lot different than pneumonia, too. A broken bone is obvious, even to lay persons, if they're pointed out. But I was always the one who, when they had x-rays of "normal lung" and "lung with infiltrates" side by side in a text-book, I could sit for hours and not find a difference in them. Part of that may simply have been they were both obviously two different people and so their anatomy was different, and that would throw off what I was looking at/for in the "pictures."
I pretty much knew, staring across that x-ray room that my surgery was off; that somehow I now had pneumonia. Granted, I have been coughing my head off, but the cough suppressant I had been taking had been working so well and, as I said, I hadn't had a fever until just them in peri-op. What a time for all this to happen! I also was having a very weird sensation of "bubbling up" in my throat of mucous, esp. after coughing, though I am not coughing anything up, I knew there was shit down there that would have liked to be loosened up a bit. (I have only actually let myself "cough stuff up" twice in my life and both times were an accident and both times I nearly vomited. Mucous doesn't bother me so much with other people, 'cept those little babies and toddlers who run around with green slime constantly fucking dripping from their nostrils and they wipe it all over their faces and into their eyes and shit with their sleeves or bare hands. The weird "bubbling up" sensation cause enough worry last night that I meant to have Brent grab my stethoscope for me so I could hear if I noticed anything "bad" while breathing, as I was starting to get paranoid.
And rightly so. The radiologist looked at the films, determined there to be infiltrates (a fancy way of saying pneumonia) in the mid lobe (rt. lung). Surgery was canceled. I was heartbroken. I have no words for how sad I was. I just cried. Even though I knew the news that was coming when the RN came in to tell me I cried.
The bad thing/s: Well, obviously I have pneumonia, which isn't good, but at least there's medicine for that! Other bad thing is I will now have to endure another 8 days of pain before we can begin to get this solved. It will be even longer before I can go to work since surgery has been delayed. Grrr.....
The good thing/s: My doctor is nice enough that he is giving up half of his day off the day after Thanksgiving to come in special and do the surgery for me, therefore making me only have to wait a week and a day instead of two weeks minimum before surgery. I get to go see BNL in concert on Sunday without worry of whether I'd be in the hospital or not! YAY!