Losing track of time and another scare

The Saturday post op passed in a bit of a blur. Hubby came to visit. To be honest I wasn't up to facing anyone - dressed in a skimpy hospital gown, in lots of pain and feeling very miserable. Breakfast was the cereal bowl of coffee, lunch was a very nice beef stew and very flobby tagliatelli, dinner was soup, and gawd knows what else. Most of the food was unrecognisable, cooked to within an inch of it's life and all the same colour! No I lie, the soup varied slightly in colour but tasted the same, every time! Good job I didn't feel hungry or thirsty for that matter.

I mastered the art of the bed pan but still felt a bit out of it and sleepy. A new weekend "night crew" came on duty. On the whole I couldn't fault the nurses. They were kind and attentive. The magic buzzer had them coming running.

There are various grades of staff on duty. For an outsider it's pretty hard to distinguish who is who as they all wear exactly the same uniform. White trousers and a white tunic with an iron-on name badges. I suppose if I'd looked closely I could have worked out who did what. Anyway there was the nice short blond lady who seemed to mainly be resposible for bedpans and a nurse more qualifified to dispense medication. The real "nurse" came across as very efficient, seemingly achieving every duty she had to attend to speedily. She rigged up new drips, telling me they would be disconnected the following day anyway, checked the pump (was there enough to last the night? Mmmm....). The night passed. A piddle or two on a bed pan and an extreme burning sensation once more in my left thigh. In case I haven't mentioned this before my operation was on my RIGHT hip and my left side should not have been affected at all, especially not changes in sensation.

Morning came, along with pain. I needed desperately to do a pee and pressed my buzzer. The nice lady came in, cheerily saying hello and opening the shutters. She bent to insert the bedpan in the appropriate position but I could not for the life of me raise myself up to get on it. Not without extreme pain anyway. She rushed out and called for the "nurse" who came in and rigged up a drip with pain relief. All seemed to be going well, I could see the medication dripping nicely, the nurses changed shifts and then all of a sudden I realised all was not right. My arm was swelling up like a balloon with the skin becoming tighter and tighter. OMG my arm is going to explode!!!

A nurse from the day shift arrived and told me not to worry, the "perfusion"was not going into a vein as it should be but into my arm! So much for that super efficient night nurse!! She said not to worry and she'd soon sort it out. At this point I was quite alarmed. She came back and removed the canula, which was a relife in itself, and put some red hot compresses onto my swollen arm and bandaged it up. What catalogue of disasters.

Breakfast once again and my kindly voisine shared with me some of the spoils her neice had brought in for her the previous evening - a nice, buttery croissant! She was discharged later that morning and also left a large bag of cherries her husband had brought in for her. I don't know what her name was but I am glad she was there.