From hospital - Thursday

The drain has cleared 80ml overnight, which is nowhere near enough. My leg is like a giant sausage-shaped water balloon this morning and it is completely numb, like how your arm feels when you sleep on it and have no feeling at all. When I prod it, it feels like I'm touching somebody else. But there is no real pain other than the nerve pain when vaccing, and that cannot be touched even by morphine, so I asked to be untethered from it this morning. I am now officially not a junkie!

My lovely physios came along just now and asked if I'd like to try some stairs. They'd brought a wheelchair along, bless them, and seemed quite surprised when I said I didn't need it. They were more surprised when I zipped along at quite a speed, and when I went up and downstairs at a near normal pace, they looked at each other, laughed and said clearly I didn't need them. I got a 10 out of 10. Yay! I feel like I finally did something right! I was hoping to get out of here today but now there's talk of it being Monday. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a big deal but I really did want to be home for Easter. 

I have to say, I am getting really frustrated now with the lack of communication and knowledge of what's going on. I seem to give the same information to lots of different people - 4 doctors and 8 nurses at last count - and nothing gets done about it. I am swelling up more by the hour and as of 3pm, nothing has been done. I first flagged it up 23 hours ago. I am lucky enough that I can physically get up and go make people listen to me. What if I had dementure or wasn't of sound mind? It's easy to see how things slip through the net. Patients should not have to explain the same thing to 12 different people. It should be written down, acted on and information fed back to the patient.

Update 8pm - After two miserably failed attempts by the nurses to attach a stoma bag to my drain, Mr Brackley came and did it himself with the help of skin glue and a dermabandage. It now drains through a small bag into a 2 litre bag which I can carry around. Not as neat as a suction drain but definitely functional. As of bedtime, we're at a fresh 150ml. Thank god for him. Also, he explained that the pain was likely caused by the end of the drain tube in my leg sitting close to a nerve. When the vac creates pressure, it sucks on the nerve and causes the pain. It turns out my leg feels dead because he removed the main nerve during the operation (it was too entangled with my lymph node chain). Hopefully within 6-12 months my other nerves will start to compensate a little. I should regain some sensation and stop feeling so much like I have a dead leg.