The Hospital Experience
from a wife's point of view
The morning of surgery Doug woke up at 2:45. He says he felt like a 10-year-old on Christmas morning. He turned on the TV and it was so loud that it woke me up, but he couldn't find the remote. I heard him banging around trying to find it and I knew he was getting upset, so I got up and stayed up with him until it was time to get ready to go to the hospital.
Doug's parents, sister-in-law, and one cousin were with me in the waiting room and several members of OSSG-SA called and visited that first day. His surgery took almost 3 hours, a little longer than usual, but he didn't have to have his gall bladder out and he didn't need any blood. They sent him to recovery afterward and told us we could see him in SICU in an hour or so. So we went directly to SICU where the volunteer told us that it would be an hour. There were about 30 people who had asked for a phone call to let them know how the surgery went. I knew I wouldn't be up for making all those calls, so I had asked 5 volunteers to make calls for me. Doug's parents had left, so his cousin and sister-in-law and I called those five people plus his PCP and TRC counselor.
To make a long story short, it was 3 1/2 hours before he made it up to SICU. I was afraid that meant that there was something wrong, but the volunteer said it was just the opposite, all the SICU beds and some of the cardiac ICU beds were being taken up by people who were in worse shape than Doug, so I was relieved.
Finally, we got to see him. They didn't have him on a respirator or anything, but I've never seen anyone with so many tubes coming out of them in so many places. He had a NG tube in his nose, an IV in each arm, a central line in his neck, a drain from his stomach, and a catheter for urine. None of them seemed to bother him though. He kept asking for his CPAP because he isn't used to sleeping without it. The doctor said no CPAP because it's hard on the new pouch the first night and that's why he was in ICU, so they could tell if his O2 saturation went down and do something about it. They wouldn't let me stay in the ICU room with him overnight, so I thought that since he had one to one nursing care that first night, it would be a better time for me to leave him rather than later, when he would have to share a nurse with lots of other patients. That turned out to be a good decision.
A funny thing happened. Doug mentioned the special Bariatric bed in his story. Nobody could figure out how to make any of it work. At first (pre-op) the nurses couldn't get it to do anything, then they realized it wasn't plugged in (I think each side plugs in separately or something weird). Then the rails wouldn't go up, then they couldn't get them to go back down. Then when the guys came to move him downstairs, they banged up the bed on the walls trying to get it out of the room - it is very wide compared to a normal hospital bed. My mother- in-law leaned over to me and whispered "I hope they don't expect any of that fancy equipment on the bed to work after this." After the surgery again it was my mother-in-law who figured out how to work the bed for the SICU nurse. Later the nurse tried the feature of the bed that measures the patient's weight in the bed. Apparently, no one zeroed out the weight before letting Doug get in the bed, so when the nurse pushed the button, it showed the weight of the previous occupant. I told the nurse and the nurse told Dr. Reiss that this surgery must be REALLY good because Doug had already lost almost 200 pounds!!
The next morning I returned to the hospital and stayed over each night with him. Thankfully, his private room had a recliner in it that I could sleep on. It was very tiring, but I wouldn't do it any other way. I think I was more excited than Doug was when the doctor said he could go home. I had never been in favor of the hospital bed downstairs idea. I was determined that I would stay with him until the danger of a pulmonary embolism had passed, so I planned to sleep on a mattress on the floor next to him. When he decided to try to sleep in our bed upstairs, I was very happy.
At this time (second day out of the hospital) he is experimenting with eating and trying to walk a lot. I am so proud of him. Don't let anyone tell you that gastric bypass surgery is the easy way to lose weight. Doug has gone through a lot to get to this point and every new step he takes toward a healthy new life, makes me even more proud of him.