What its like in a hospital

I am going to describe what it was like to stay at the hospital for ten days. You lose track of the time of day and the day of the week. It doesn’t matter; it’s all the same. Vital signs are taken every few hours. People are constantly in and out of your room never letting you rest. Blood was drawn every single morning between 4am-5am. Two teams of residents would start coming between 5:30am-7am. Then I had two surgeons. They would come in between 8am-10am. And then I had a nutritionist that would come every day—because I didn’t eat food for 11 days. Also an infectious disease doctor would see me every day too.

The I.V. would beep and I would have to call the nurse. I always had to lie on my back and the beds were super uncomfortable. When I got home I counted 16 pricks (that I still could see) on my arms. My arms are still sore even though I have been out for three days. I had at least 6 different I.V. sites. It was changed every 3-4 days. At one point I had two I.V.s because I was getting PPN which is partial parenteral nutrition. I only got the nutrition through my viens for two days though because I got phlebitis, an infection in the vein. So thus, I have lost 15 pounds since the surgery. I originally weighed about 130 lb and now I am 113 lb at 5’8” yikes! But I will soon gain it back.

In the room next to me, there was a woman with dementia who had just gotten a tumor taken out of her stomach. She would scream and scream at night. She yelled things like “help us! Don’t let them near us! Call the police” lol kind of entertaining, except when you tried to sleep. Then when she moved out after like 5 days I got an orthodox Jewish man. He was better; although one night there were like 10 men in his room with like instruments and they were all singing and playing music in the evening really loudly. I was just like “wtf” haha but it was funny.

I never want to go back there! Even though I know I have to again soon. Hopefully in a month (probably longer) I will get the second surgery to reverse the stoma (the small intestines that is on the outside of my skin currently). The surgeons say it should take less time to recover from this surgery—but I spoke to someone in town who said it took just as long to recover from the second one as it did from the first one.