Recent Weeks

I went to bed before midnight on the 13th because I knew that it would be easier to avoid eating that way. That didn't make sleeping that night any easier, though; maybe it was the idea that I was having surgery the next day, maybe it was simple insomnia (I seem to be having a lot of that this summer) or maybe it was secret government radio waves beaming directly into my head the best hits of the '60s, '70s and '80s, I'll never know. The point is that I didn't sleep too well that night.

My splenectomy was scheduled for 10:30 on Monday, which meant that we had to arrive at the hospital around 8:30. Thanks to the aforementioned uneasy sleep, it wasn't a problem waking up early enough to make this happen. The waiting room was agonizing thanks in large part to the incredibly loud TV blasting The Early Show into every corner of the room. There was a competition to see who could best sing the Star-Spangled Banner and everyone who was competing (at least when we got there) made me wish I could leap out of my skin and just lay on the floor in a heap of organ, tissue and bone.

When we were finally taken into the pre-op area, I stripped out of my clothes and into a gown that felt suspiciously like paper. I didn't really want the TV on, but my dad insisted to watch something, so instead of ESPN I opted for MADtv. I would have honestly rather watched nothing, but it wasn't that kind of deal. Various nurses, specialists, and needles came in to prod me with questions, thermometers, names, blood pressure thingies and blood samples, but I saw the surgeon at noon sharp. I don't remember being wheeled to the OR, or even being in the OR at all except for the anesthesia mask they put on me. The next hazy memory I have was drowsily speaking to somebody as they inserted my catheter, and then I was in my recovery room.

The basic timeline escapes me, but the important things went like this: Monday was the most uncomfortable day for me because I still had a lot of gas in my torso from the surgery. I was given a morphine drip, but the amount I could administer for myself was generally too small to make an impact on the pain in my stomach. Late that night, I finally couldn't stand the pain any longer and I asked a nurse to let me up so that I could walk around my bed for a bit. Either that or the pain pill she gave me helped a lot. Recovery was basically that same run-around over and over: pain pills, getting up to walk around from time to time, and struggling to eat. I would have left the hospital on Tuesday or Wednesday, but the doctors were concerned about how low my hemoglobin count was, and up until I was released it was looking more and more likely that I'd need a transfusion. Fortunately, that didn't happen.

While I was in the hospital, my parents visited every day. That wasn't really too comforting or helpful to me, since they would simply do their own thing and I would either sleep or watch TV. I guess we didn't really have anything to say. My brother was a different story, though. He came to visit me on the first night along with Melissa, then again on the second night which is when they brought me Batman: Gotham Knight on DVD (a collection of animé shorts which I highly recommend to any fans of Batman or of animé), but Melissa was getting a migraine that night, so my brother came back a couple nights later and we watched the DVD together then.

I had vowed not to miss an episode of Avatar that week, because it was Nickelodeon's big push to the end of the series. Every night at 7:00, I had my TV on, and when I got out of the hospital on Friday I still watched it. By the end of the series on Saturday, I felt so amazed at the shape the TV show had taken: from being another action show three years ago to developing a strong, complicated plot where everybody had ambition and purpose behind what they were doing. Every time something like that happens, I go back in my mind to how things were when it began. I was a senior in high school... even in the pain of that year, things seemed a lot simpler back then.

The following week was painful. I still wasn't able to eat very well, and sleep only came to me in bursts when I took a hydrocodone, which I ran out of before the 25th. My dad informed me that I still had oxycodone from when I had my gall bladder out last year, but given the strength of that drug and the number of pills I had left of it, I decided that I wouldn't use it during the day, and that I'd only take one after trying to get to sleep and being unable to from pain. I had a few of those nights afterward, but the pain kept coming later in the night until it would hit at 5:00 AM. That abated too, but I still wake up every day at five in the morning before going back to sleep for a few more hours. I have no clue when to expect my first uninterrupted night of sleep, but with any luck it'll come soon. I've been slowly losing sleep for nearly three weeks now.

I decided early on while I was home that I should try to sing again. My reasoning, beyond obviously liking to sing, was that the doctors gave me a special tool to exercise my lungs by encouraging me to take deep breaths; I figured that since singing is one of the most demanding non-aerobic things your lungs can do, it would help get my lung capacity back to normal more quickly. This was how I discovered arguably the weirdest thing about this recovery: I cry when I sing anything that's even slightly sad. I haven't tried singing "Hallelujah" by John Cale yet. If "Dizzy" and "Cautioners" by Jimmy Eat World and "That's What You Get" by Paramore make me sob, I don't think I could even get through one verse of "Hallelujah." A friend of mine said that in some part of the world, the spleen is associated with melancholy. I'd say it's probably the lack thereof that's associated with it.