What I Got For Christmas
It wasn't that bad. There was a little bait and switch pricing two hours before surgery but we worked that out--to my detriment--and it was no time at all before they had me gowned up (the orderly gave me an extra pair of non-skid socks as souvenir) and were shoving release forms up in my face to sign and marking me with indelible markers so they didn't screw up and cut me on the wrong side. On the operating table they slid off my hospital issue draw string pants right before turning on the demerol stream and that was the last I saw of them. They weren't in my bag when I got home and I am formally listing that as a regret. I really wanted those draw string hospital pants. I had looked into a future which had me lounging in them.
I'm normally a 118 over 75 kind of guy but immediately after the negotiations with Beth Israel's finance department a nurse took a reading and I was 148 over 98 or thereabouts. I told her no, I am not a sufferer of high blood pressure, I think what is happening is my blood pressure reading is selling me out, belying my calm demeanor to say--hey this guy is really upset about being screwed out of 3 or 4 thousand dollars an hour or two before going under the knife for the first time in his life. That's my estimation of the situation. The nurse was understanding and said we would not worry about my blood pressure. I gave her my height and weight too. It seems nowadays they just trust you with that information rather than going to the trouble of actually using measuring devices. I rounded my height down by a half inch and my weight up by five pounds because I am tall and thin enough to benefit from the adjustment. I got my temperature taken with one of those thermometers that seems like a large rollerball pen they just trace across your forehead, from temple to temple and that's it. Such a thing as this thermometer defines a modernness that I always hoped I would see, especially as it appears I will not (nor will any of us) live long enough to see the mass production of flying cars.
After years of delay I had a month or two ago started this medical forward movement to address a situation that while not life threatening or even necessary to deal with in the strictest sense, was however causing me some discomfort both physically and emotionally. And to exacerbate my general ease with inaction, every doctor that has studied me over the last couple of years has made it clear by one expression or another that I have really shown a level of procrastination worthy of standing ovation applause, if procrastination were a rock band for which you camped out overnight to get tickets and then you ingested three or four mushroom caps and there was a light show and you literally cried because it was all so beautiful.
I will get to the point and say that the original procedure of concern was that of excising a hydrocele. A hydrocele is fluid in the nut sack and is common with infants but I have always been a late bloomer so I was dealing with mine as a fifty two year old man.
I don't really have any doctors I consider my own so I got a reference from Bernadette's primary care physician for a urologist here in New York. The last time I almost took care of this was in North Carolina when I had that kidney stone during the renovation of my rental property, two or three years ago. The doctors at Duke said they could take care of it for me but I let days and months pass and could never find what seemed like a good time for what is on some level a two or three month recuperation. And then I just kept getting farther and farther from North Carolina so it never made sense to do it there.
The urologist said it appeared I also had a hernia so he sent me to a general surgeon who does that sort of thing and we all got together and decided it would be logical to do the two procedures at once.
They didn't even have me count backward. When the anesthesiologist turned on that drip it was almost instantaneous bliss, which I got to experience for what seemed like three or four seconds before I was under and they started shaving and slicing and inserting mesh and stitching up and then tag your it, my urologist did his thing down there. I highly recommend not researching the subject too carefully unless you are in the market for such a procedure yourself, or, you have a fetish that way. It is a fairly gruesome thing. I was at a party the other night and there was a very experienced nurse in attendance and I mentioned the procedure by name--hydrocelectomy--and she winced, if that tells you anything. Of course there are far worse ailments and surgeries and predicaments in a life so there is always the perspective of that. That's right, I am grateful.
I got some Percocets to take home with me and I thought that was a silver lining to the whole thing. Until after three or four days of taking five or six a day I got the first sense that I may have to deal with the constipation issue.
What happened, it seems, is that someone snuck in here one night during my opiate dream and inserted a fair length of two by four up my ass. And so I would never shit again. That was obvious. I had been prepping for this possibility even before surgery by removing red meat from my diet, increasing my fiber intake, etc., and then after surgery I was continuing to eat high fiber, was drinking prune juice, ingesting vitamin C, taking softeners, and eventually a laxative and--nothing, but discomfort and a growing sense of dread.
On Christmas eve night, after attending briefly the party across the hall, I spent ten hours of shear hell in the bathroom with zero result. Christmas night was a repeat of that, with pacing and jiggling and weird hula dancing type movements and massaging my now hugely bloated belly trying to make something happen. All for naught.
On the day after Christmas I was sort of like a broken man. If I possessed any state secrets I would have given them up for the chance to empty my bowels.
In addition to this discomfort I was also still post op from two cuts in my body, both near and affecting the necessary muscles one needs to pass solid waste, and the liquid for that matter. Also, on those many occasions when I had to stand up or sit down or get in and out of bed there would sometimes be the sensation of having a rusty icepick inserted decisively into my left testicle. So that was nice. In the sense that it took my mind off the constipation. Whenever I was in the mood to be careful I could be seen, or not, shuffling bent over at the waist around the apartment, because that seemed to offer the least chance of pain.
I wept a couple of times just because I wasn't happy.
But its doable obviously, all of it, so don't let any of this discourage you if you are in the market for a hernia repair and hydrocele excision on the same day.
In the end it was a store bought enema product that did the trick. And although there was howling and huffing and puffing and tears that seemed to just pop from my eyeballs onto the floor between my legs propped up on an empty le Creuset box, not like crying at all, and I must say there were two or three actual screams, ones like I've never heard from out of me, but after about three hours there was one final explosion and then I was calm in a way that is familiar and now I'm back to just run of the mill pain, which I manage mostly without outside aide. I have a few percs left and I will once a day or less eat one just for the fun of it.
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