Katja, looking remarkably cheerful
before her anticipated journey to the After-Life
Dear George,
Katja had her shoulder
replacement surgery on Friday. It
was hard to believe since she’s still recovering from knee surgery. However, Dr. G said there weren’t any
options, and they decided to move ahead.
Dr. G is a jovial, middle-aged man with a sense of humor and an
unquenchable optimism. Though
Katja had gotten some cautionary advice about the risks of shoulder
replacements, Dr. G didn’t have a qualm in the world. He explained that it’s 99% successful and that all his
patients love it. I asked Dr. G
about pain, and he said some patients have no pain at all. Others might be uncomfortable for
months, but there’s no way of telling beforehand. In any case, Katja would be up and around in a day or two,
he said; would be driving soon after; and would have a greatly improved range
of motion in her arthritis-plagued shoulder. All in all, it sounded terrific, and Katja was eager to get
it done.
The operation took place in
a suburban hospital. Just
beforehand the nurse explained to Katja that she would be under general
anaesthesia for three hours. Katja
was taken aback by this news, and she whispered to me that she didn’t think
she’d ever come out of it. As they
wheeled her out, she gave me a goodbye kiss that had an air of finality about
it. Aside from signing a form
acknowledging that death is one of the known side effects, Katja hadn’t worried
much up to that point, nor had I.
I waited in her hospital room, reading Dave Barry to keep my mind off
more serious matters. After three
hours Dr. G came in and said that the operation had gone perfectly and that
Katja had been an excellent patient.
A while later the nurse brought in Katja’s bed with her in it. She was out like a light. The anaesthesiologist stopped by and
tried to speak to her, but, despite poking and nudging and speaking loudly in
her ear, he got no response at all.
He said that everybody’s different and that it wasn’t that uncommon to
still be unconscious. He added
that her vital signs looked good; then he left. I thought about Katja’s fear that she’d never wake up, but I
didn’t ask about it. In fact,
Katja did blink and open her eyes about half an hour later, and she seemed
amazed but happy to have returned to the living. I stayed around for a while, then returned to town to get
the doggies.
Dr. G had said that
everybody likes to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible and that
Katja would be discharged on Saturday morning. When I returned, the nurse went over the instructions about
home care, doing exercises, danger signs for calling the doctor, etc. She said it was imperative for Katja to
begin doing exercises right away to prevent a frozen shoulder and permanent
loss of use of her arm. That
caught our attention. She said to
call the doctor in case of persisting high fever, excessive loss of blood,
undue swelling, signs of infection, dizziness, nausea, etc. They left a catheter in her shoulder
which would continue to feed a pain-reducing numbing agent to the incision area
for two or three days. Then they
brought Katja out to the car in a wheelchair.
On the way home we stopped
at our neighborhood Graeters to get an ice cream cone, but Katja was too dizzy
and unsteady to walk. Once home
she got into bed and fell into a deep sleep. Hours later Katja woke and I suggested that she try her
exercises, but she was too exhausted.
Visions of a frozen shoulder flashed before my eyes. Later in the evening her temperature
started rising, I noticed that her arm was swelling and turning purple, and a
moderate amount of blood has leaked from the catheter site. Katja needed help sitting up or getting
out of the bed, and she felt sick and nauseated. She said she should still be in the hospital, and I
wholeheartedly agreed. We were
doing a sort of make-believe hospital at home, but it was a pretty amateur
operation. I thought about calling
the doctor, but I didn’t know if Katja’s symptoms were acute enough and I
didn’t want to bother him on Saturday night. Finally we called our own son J (who, to our good fortune,
is a physician), and he gave us helpful, calming advice.
We were taking care of our
friend Donna’s sheepdog, Sophie, while Donna was out of town, and I’d created a
barricade of boxes and chairs around the bed to keep the three dogs off and
avoid any harmful bumping and jarring.
Katja felt sad about depriving the dogs of their favorite bedtime spots,
and the dogs themselves were distraught and confused, sitting motionless at the
edge of the barrier, looking soulfully at me and begging to be allowed in. By early morning the dogs had started
stirring, and, just to be on the safe side, I got up to take them out for a
pre-dawn walk. Katja was feeling a
little better by Sunday noon, and I was very relieved when she got up and did
her pendulum exercises (leaning over and swinging her arm in different
directions). Then she went back to
sleep. I let the three dogs in the
bed with her and monitored them while I watched the Bengals game.
By Monday morning Katja’s
catheter apparatus had run out of medication. The nurse had given me instructions about removing it. She said it would be easy, and I it
was, sort of. I pulled away the
tape and then began pulling the catheter tubing out of her shoulder. It seemed to go on forever – maybe an
inch and a half – a very unappealing experience. The nurse had said that occasionally the black tip of the
catheter comes off inside the patient’s arm and that I should bring her back to
the hospital if that happened. I
didn’t see any black tip on the tube that I pulled out, though I didn’t know
what it was supposed to look like.
All in all, I decided that I was totally unqualified to be a home care
nurse. I chatted later with a
physical therapist who said that the primary emphasis in medicine today is on
limiting benefits. That seemed to
explain Katja’s inordinately brief hospital stay. Katja vowed that this would be the last surgery she would
ever have. Apparently she didn’t
love it as much as Dr. G’s other patients had, at least not so far. The long-term outcome, of course, should
be very positive, and it’s just a matter of toughing it out through the
recovery phase. We saw the surgeon
this morning, and he said Katja was progressing excellently. She is definitely doing much
better. Now we’re ready to skip
ahead a couple of months.
Love,
Dave
G-mail Comments
-Linda K-C
(10-2): Liked letter about the
shoulder surgery, glad she is doing so well!
No comments:
Post a Comment