Sometime after midnight I started wondering about how they were monitoring me. I asked the nurse if that black circle on the ceiling was a camera. She said it was a light and that there were no cameras in the room. I asked how I was being monitored and she seemed very confused. I had to explain that I was told I was going to be monitored and that it was important for me to be monitored so they could see if I had sleep apnea and stuff. She said I was doing fine and I had to explain that she was only checking on me while I was awake. This hospital stay was a rare opportunity for me to be monitored while I slept and I wanted to take advantage of that. After some arguing the nurse finally agreed to have someone hook me up to a machine.
I was in a great deal of pain and I still am. It's not too bad in terms of constant pain but it hurts a great deal more when I swallow, which I'm apparently supposed to do a lot. I was repeatedly asked where the pain was and of course I always answered that it was in my throat where, you guessed it, my tonsils had been removed. I was given a variety of narcotic pain medications and none of them were able to get me to a point where I could swallow comfortably save one: fentanyl. Naturally I assumed this meant that I'd be getting more of it since it was the only one that I responded well too. I mean otherwise, why would they keep asking how I felt and if the meds were working? Unfortunately the nurse was argumentative about this request as well. The list of tricks she cycled through went something like this:
1. "You don't get any more fentanyl tonight."
To this I would reply that I would like to have some in the morning then. She repeated herself: no more fentanyl tonight. She seemed to have trouble distinguishing "tonight" from "tomorrow morning."
2. "You're already taking three narcotics."
And I only need one: fentanyl. Please give me that instead.
3. "Fentanyl only lasts an hour."
I would much rather have a stronger drug that lasts a little bit than a weaker drug that lasts the whole time between doses. An hour is more than enough time to eat a meal. When I'm not swallowing, I don't need to medicate the pain.
4. "Just stop eating to give your throat a rest."
This defeats the purpose. I want my throat to feel better so that I can eat. If I'm not eating then I don't need my throat to feel better.
5. "You can't take fentanyl at home since it's an IV med and we need to find a medication that works for you to take home."
We've already tried everything and we've already found the one that works and since I can't take it at home you're refusing to give it to me the one time I can take it.
6. "I'm not the doctor so I don't decide what drugs to give you."
Yet you've already demonstrated that you can make suggestions about what drugs I get to take since I asked for a non-prescription throat spray and it was brought to me.
Eventually this culminated in a nurse rant (which is like a normal rant but slow and gentle) where she repeated herself over and over again in broken English (almost none of the nurses seemed to speak it as their first language) until I finally gave up.
I certainly don't think the consent form I signed had anything about giving them the right to withhold my tonsils from me. I asked to see my tonsils many times during my stay, to which nurses always replied that they'd see about it. The first time was right after I awoke from the anesthesia, and I was told my tonsils had been taken to the lab. By the time I was leaving the hospital and I asked to see my tonsils one last time I was told they had already been sliced into little pieces. I asked to see them anyway.
I finally got to the lab and saw my tonsils in little baggies. They looked much smaller than I expected, and apparently my adenoids were in there too but could not be identified to me for some reason. I commented that they looked like crab meat, and one of the women working there started laughing. Either she is greatly deprived of humor in her daily life or she found me attractive, but Occam's Razor would have me rule out the latter for being too unlikely.
Right now I'm having difficulty breathing because tampon-like splints have been sewn into my nostrils. This is supposedly to allow my nose to heal properly, but I certainly wish they could have been tube-shaped or something so that air would have a sure way through. When I woke from the surgery I was not told the splints had been put it and I certainly wasn't told what to do about them. As I was clearing out some blood clots from my nose with my finger (which I wasn't supposed to do and hadn't been told not to do) I found the splints and at first thought they were just more blood clots so I tried to get them out until I realized what they were. So I became worried that I might have shifted them out of place so that they were blocking more air now than they should be. During the night I called for a nurse and a male nurse from Kenya showed up and I asked him to examine my splints and he said they looked fine. But today when I was leaving I asked my regular nurse to have a look at the splints and she wouldn't do it. She said she wasn't a doctor and wasn't the one who put them in and no matter how I explained that another nurse already performed such a check she insisted against it.
When I got home I got to use a squirting device to "irrigate" my nostrils. Reading the instructions for how to do it, I learned that I was supposed to start doing it right after my surgery. None of the nurses told me about this or gave me the tools to do it. I'm supposed to keep irrigating my nostrils to keep the blood from clotting, but I'm afraid a lot of blood has already clotted because I didn't start soon enough and it's too crusty to be affected by the nasal spray alone. But the nurses all told me I wasn't supposed to put any solid objects in my nose, so I'm kind of at a loss here until the medical team responds to my emails. I just hope I don't suffocate in my sleep before then.
I'm glad I got the surgery but I'm not happy at all with how it went.
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