From hospital - Wednesday

Crappy crappy day.

I woke up desperate for toilet but I lay there for a couple of hours not daring to move. Eventually the bladder pain overwhelmed me so I decided to brave it; happily I got to the loo and back uneventfully. During their rounds, some more doctors came to see me; they knew about last night's pain although they thought it was around the drain site, which reiterates to my mind that the nurses didn't understand after all. I explained as best I could to the doctor, who said it was likely nerve damage and it should settle down. He said my drain wasn't vacced and we would just let gravity do its job - the lymph would slowly drip out in of its own accord. I got the sense again that nobody fully understood the pain I was in. Maybe nobody was properly listening because I was saying it over and over again; it made me scream at the top of my voice, it was like nothing I'd ever felt, it was unimaginable. And yet they were asking whether it was sharp or more of a dull ache. 

Despite a good 45-minute walk around the entire floor of hospital, the drain wasn't filling a jot. I could feel a pouch of swelling around my abdomen and hip, and by the time my husband arrived at 6pm, it felt like there were water balloons inside my thigh so I asked the nurse what would happen if she vacuumed the drain. She told me to push a few ml of morphine then she'd give it a go. The fear of the pain was almost like the pain itself, dreadful, like no fear I've ever felt before. Before this, if you asked me to name three things I'm afraid of, I'd have given you spiders, butterflies and heights. To combat them, I have made myself hold a tarantula, go into a free-flying butterfly house and do a zipwire from a 10-storey building. I am not a coward by a long way but this fear of the pain was making me feel that way and making me seem that way to onlookers who didn't understand.

After I'd pushed four lots of morphine, Alex went to get the nurse who she said she'd go slow and I could say stop at any time. She took the tube out of the old drain and said as soon as she put it in the new one, it would start to flow. One deep breath then I gave the okay. It flowed. For three seconds I thought it would be fine, and then it hit. An immense pain rushing through my leg. Against my will I started screaming, felt like my leg was on fire. I remember begging 'please make it stop'.  I guess she must have because the pain ended within maybe ten seconds. My poor husband looked like he wanted to cry and I felt dreadful for putting him in the middle of this. It's not something I would have wanted to see, my beloved partner screaming in pain.

After 10 minutes, with the drain de-vacced and working purely on gravity again, we went for a walk. After that, back in bed, we put the drain on the ground and slowly it started dripping. It's clearly not going to drain properly but a few drips are better than nothing.