times flies when you're...stuck in White Rock??
Greetings followers,
Well somehow over a month has slipped away from me. This is, on the one hand, glorious since it means that I'm one month closer to my great escape back to the homeland of smiles but it also means that I was so wrapped up in the going ons of life in glorious White Rock that I completely ignored my blog. That being said, since my last post things have been a bit hectic. Mom has been readmitted and then discharged from the hospital 3 times for a myriad of complications. She has now been home for over 2 weeks which is the longest she's been home in one shot so we're hoping we've hit a turning point. Nowhere near "recovered" but hopefully getting better.
As for me, my recovery has been up and down, mostly up but there have been a few hiccups in there. Recently after being plagued by digestive issues, stomach pains and things generally being not quite right, I decided to make an appointment with my surgeon just to double check. Turns out that they left a tube in me (which they were supposed to and didn't think to tell me) and it somehow got dislodged and was backing up bile and all sorts of goodies into my digestive tract. Hence the lovely feeling in my tummy. Anyway, the surgeon told me to just leave it and it would sort itself out. Easier said than done in my opinion but I guess they know best...I'll just sit around and wait for my tube to dislodge...
I've also had a few setbacks in the healing of my abdominal muscles. They seem fine but I've discovered that just a slight movement in the wrong direction puts me in pain for weeks. I'm fine as long as I don't twist my abdominals but the minute I do I'm toast. On the one hand this is fine because I can bike and jog and use the stairclimber at the gym but it completely rules out boxing and any form of aerobics. As of right now I still, at three months, can't lift anything more than a few grocery bags either. This completely rules out any form of diving in the near future as well. Considering the snail's pace at which the ab muscles on my left are getting reacquainted with the ab muscles on my right, I worry about when I'm going to be able to get back under the waves. Originally, I was hoping to be in Bali getting my "Best Dive Job" on in April but I moved it back to the end of May. The lovely Tom West, the intern coordinator at Blue Season Bali, has told me that I am fine to wait as long as I need to get fully recovered. In the end, it's best for me and them if I am healthy and ready to go when I get there. So I have booked May 27th as my official arrival date on the islands of the Gods...granted the 75$ Air Asia sale ticket kinda helped me decide on a date. At this rate I can't see myself being ready to haul tanks and double down with a gas mix on my back until then.
...sigh... oh well, not much that I can do about it, what's done is done.
Anyway, let's get back to the task at hand - back to the happenings of what seems like a lifetime ago.
It's hard now, looking back, to remember much that happened in those couple weeks in the hospital. I can remember very little which I guess is a good thing, the mind has a way of blocking out things that are better left in the past. I guess I should be thankful for that. One thing that I do remember with vivid clarity however is my foray into the world of morphine induced delusions.
Considering I was disemboweled and stapled together from my chest to my belly button, I was the recipient of enough morphine to quell an army, pumped directly into my carotid artery through an PIC line in my neck (which has left me with a lovely "vampire kiss" scar by the way). While I was stepping it up in Step Down, I was lucid enough to know what was going on and wasn't really seeing anything too strange. Not everyone in the unit was as lucky though. I can remember instances of people screaming and yelling in the unit, fighting battles with things that only they could see.
A few days later I ended up fighting my own battles, unfortunately my mind has decided that it'd be best for me to remember these in vivid detail.
A few days after I was moved into the post-surgical ward I started to see things that weren't there. The worst part was I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. As far as I could tell, I was fine, clear headed and happily interacting with people around me. I later found out that some of these visits might not have even happened. I also spent one morning accusing my sister of sneaking fistfuls meds from beside my bed into her purse and showing up with a giant bag full of ugly T-shirts (for reasons that I'm still not sure).
If my adventures into the shady recesses of my consciousness would have remained focused on my sister's pharmaceutical kleptomania or her poor taste in fashion would have been fine but soon, as morphine hallucinations tend to go, things got a lot less pleasant.
Morphine terrors are quite common and they have a usual cast of characters - usually of the insect/rodent family. For me it was spiders which is surprising because I don't really have a fear of them, I don't like them, but I don't fear them necessarily. Anyway, over the span of two days my room became completely covered in spiders. On the walls, on the curtains, on the ceiling, on the floor. Big, massive fist sized arachnids everywhere. It got to the point where I was afraid to open my eyes and needed a nurse to come sit on my bed at night while I fell asleep. After turning down my morphine a little, things seemed to calm down but after a few more days the morphine built up in my system again and they were back but much worse. One minute I'm sitting there having a nice chat with my dad and his wife and the next I look down to see hundreds of spidersrunning over the foot of my bed and all over me. The worst part of morphine terrors is that you not only see them, you feel them. My entire body was covered in them, I could feel them on my face on my arms and legs, crawling into my nostrils. In my head I knew they weren't real but when you can feel them, irrational fear takes over and you panic. Luckily for me, my dad was there and immediately got a nurse who quickly sedated me and knocked me out of my arachnid induced hysteria. Within an hour I was completely taken off morphine, I decided that the pain would be easier to deal with. Because my body was so saturated with drugs it took another 2 days for the hallucinations to go away. Strangely enough, as long as I kept my glasses off, I couldn't see the spiders clearly...even though they weren't really there, my mind had somehow convinced me they were real, so real that if I took off my glasses they became just as blurry as everything else. They were still there, I could see that they were but they looked the same as everything else does without my glasses. That night my room was still full of spiders, crawling on the walls and curtains but thankfully not on me. I was also visited by a giant iguana and a weird little alien made out of plastic water bottles that kept running around my room stopping at times to closely inspect me from the edge of my bed.
Thankfully, after the alien water bottle baby said his farewells so did the spiders and I was left to spend the remainder of my time in the hospital in peace...or at least as much peace as one can be in while staying in the hospital.
I have since found out that your liver metabolizes morphine. Considering I only had 40% of mine I'm not surprised that things backfired.
Lesson learned: refuse morphine in the future.
Cheers from the trip
J
Well somehow over a month has slipped away from me. This is, on the one hand, glorious since it means that I'm one month closer to my great escape back to the homeland of smiles but it also means that I was so wrapped up in the going ons of life in glorious White Rock that I completely ignored my blog. That being said, since my last post things have been a bit hectic. Mom has been readmitted and then discharged from the hospital 3 times for a myriad of complications. She has now been home for over 2 weeks which is the longest she's been home in one shot so we're hoping we've hit a turning point. Nowhere near "recovered" but hopefully getting better.
As for me, my recovery has been up and down, mostly up but there have been a few hiccups in there. Recently after being plagued by digestive issues, stomach pains and things generally being not quite right, I decided to make an appointment with my surgeon just to double check. Turns out that they left a tube in me (which they were supposed to and didn't think to tell me) and it somehow got dislodged and was backing up bile and all sorts of goodies into my digestive tract. Hence the lovely feeling in my tummy. Anyway, the surgeon told me to just leave it and it would sort itself out. Easier said than done in my opinion but I guess they know best...I'll just sit around and wait for my tube to dislodge...
I've also had a few setbacks in the healing of my abdominal muscles. They seem fine but I've discovered that just a slight movement in the wrong direction puts me in pain for weeks. I'm fine as long as I don't twist my abdominals but the minute I do I'm toast. On the one hand this is fine because I can bike and jog and use the stairclimber at the gym but it completely rules out boxing and any form of aerobics. As of right now I still, at three months, can't lift anything more than a few grocery bags either. This completely rules out any form of diving in the near future as well. Considering the snail's pace at which the ab muscles on my left are getting reacquainted with the ab muscles on my right, I worry about when I'm going to be able to get back under the waves. Originally, I was hoping to be in Bali getting my "Best Dive Job" on in April but I moved it back to the end of May. The lovely Tom West, the intern coordinator at Blue Season Bali, has told me that I am fine to wait as long as I need to get fully recovered. In the end, it's best for me and them if I am healthy and ready to go when I get there. So I have booked May 27th as my official arrival date on the islands of the Gods...granted the 75$ Air Asia sale ticket kinda helped me decide on a date. At this rate I can't see myself being ready to haul tanks and double down with a gas mix on my back until then.
...sigh... oh well, not much that I can do about it, what's done is done.
Anyway, let's get back to the task at hand - back to the happenings of what seems like a lifetime ago.
It's hard now, looking back, to remember much that happened in those couple weeks in the hospital. I can remember very little which I guess is a good thing, the mind has a way of blocking out things that are better left in the past. I guess I should be thankful for that. One thing that I do remember with vivid clarity however is my foray into the world of morphine induced delusions.
Considering I was disemboweled and stapled together from my chest to my belly button, I was the recipient of enough morphine to quell an army, pumped directly into my carotid artery through an PIC line in my neck (which has left me with a lovely "vampire kiss" scar by the way). While I was stepping it up in Step Down, I was lucid enough to know what was going on and wasn't really seeing anything too strange. Not everyone in the unit was as lucky though. I can remember instances of people screaming and yelling in the unit, fighting battles with things that only they could see.
A few days later I ended up fighting my own battles, unfortunately my mind has decided that it'd be best for me to remember these in vivid detail.
A few days after I was moved into the post-surgical ward I started to see things that weren't there. The worst part was I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. As far as I could tell, I was fine, clear headed and happily interacting with people around me. I later found out that some of these visits might not have even happened. I also spent one morning accusing my sister of sneaking fistfuls meds from beside my bed into her purse and showing up with a giant bag full of ugly T-shirts (for reasons that I'm still not sure).
If my adventures into the shady recesses of my consciousness would have remained focused on my sister's pharmaceutical kleptomania or her poor taste in fashion would have been fine but soon, as morphine hallucinations tend to go, things got a lot less pleasant.
Morphine terrors are quite common and they have a usual cast of characters - usually of the insect/rodent family. For me it was spiders which is surprising because I don't really have a fear of them, I don't like them, but I don't fear them necessarily. Anyway, over the span of two days my room became completely covered in spiders. On the walls, on the curtains, on the ceiling, on the floor. Big, massive fist sized arachnids everywhere. It got to the point where I was afraid to open my eyes and needed a nurse to come sit on my bed at night while I fell asleep. After turning down my morphine a little, things seemed to calm down but after a few more days the morphine built up in my system again and they were back but much worse. One minute I'm sitting there having a nice chat with my dad and his wife and the next I look down to see hundreds of spidersrunning over the foot of my bed and all over me. The worst part of morphine terrors is that you not only see them, you feel them. My entire body was covered in them, I could feel them on my face on my arms and legs, crawling into my nostrils. In my head I knew they weren't real but when you can feel them, irrational fear takes over and you panic. Luckily for me, my dad was there and immediately got a nurse who quickly sedated me and knocked me out of my arachnid induced hysteria. Within an hour I was completely taken off morphine, I decided that the pain would be easier to deal with. Because my body was so saturated with drugs it took another 2 days for the hallucinations to go away. Strangely enough, as long as I kept my glasses off, I couldn't see the spiders clearly...even though they weren't really there, my mind had somehow convinced me they were real, so real that if I took off my glasses they became just as blurry as everything else. They were still there, I could see that they were but they looked the same as everything else does without my glasses. That night my room was still full of spiders, crawling on the walls and curtains but thankfully not on me. I was also visited by a giant iguana and a weird little alien made out of plastic water bottles that kept running around my room stopping at times to closely inspect me from the edge of my bed. Thankfully, after the alien water bottle baby said his farewells so did the spiders and I was left to spend the remainder of my time in the hospital in peace...or at least as much peace as one can be in while staying in the hospital.
I have since found out that your liver metabolizes morphine. Considering I only had 40% of mine I'm not surprised that things backfired.
Lesson learned: refuse morphine in the future.
Cheers from the trip
J
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