Monday, December 31, 2012

Getting Back On Track, Again

A kind soul on Facebook finally gave kick in the seat of my pants that I needed to get this blog going again. Let's see, where were we...ah, yes! The nightmare during surgery.

I've been trying to figure out that dream for a couple of years now, but a description still eludes me. Suffice it to say that I dreamt, either during surgery or in recovery, that I was being operated on in a wood-paneled room in something that seemed like a room in, of all places, Hell!. I can't remember if I was in hell, going there, or if World War III had just broken out and everybody was headed there. Either way, I dreamt that I was trying to warn the surgeon (in mid-operation) that he shouldn't be operating on me with the end of the world imminent.

My wife says I really did say this next part during recovery. Apparently, I told a nurse that I had accidentally created a MIDI controller (musical device for non-techheads) that would launch all of the world's missiles if someone programmed it to play a certain song. Don't ask me what the song was - I can't remember.

The whole hallucination was probably due to the length of the operation. I was under for two or three hours. Not long when compared to an organ replacement, but plenty long when you consider just how much ankle hardware the doctor had to insert in order to repair bimalleolar fractures with complete dislocation on both feet.

Suffice it to say that I was under for more time than I've ever been. I also woke up in EXTREME pain.

Not to end the story, but just a quick status update: I'm now on long term disability leave from my job due to a laundry list of problems that keeps getting longer. I have a heart condition called PVC (Premature Ventricular Contractions) that can strike without warning, and the electrocardiology specialist who verified these (along with another heart problem) says there's nothing he can do, mainly due to the operation I had which put the Greenfield mesh filter into my vena cava. I won't go into the other problems since they're most likely not due to the gastric bypass, but next update I will go into the real hell that is called Spending Time in a Crappy Hospital.

Watch this space for the next installment, and thank you for reading.