Making light of a real life terrible experience

This is the story of what really happened to me after surgery. It's a writing exercise to see if I can make humour out of a truly terrible experience. It appeared in the Star today.

http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2007/3/3/lifefocus/16562106&sec=lifefocus

Post-surgery horror

By EUDORA LIN

Surgery? Piece of cake. It’s the post-operation complications you should be worried about.

Everyone I know worries about having surgery. Even if it’s what I call a self-induced procedure: nip and tuck, liposuction, Caesarean because you want your baby to come out squalling on that all-important, very auspicious feng shui date.

Before I went for my “involuntary” surgery, I had heard all the stories:

“When they inject the anaesthetic into your veins, it’s like a very cold deluge flowing from your hand to your neck, and when it hits your neck, you’re out.”

“They make you count backwards from 100 to 0, and when you hit 93, you’re out.”

And so I went in quite happily to take out a tumour from my salivary gland. Only it’s notthat simple; I’d have to take out the entire upper lobe of the quite extensive gland.

Despite echoes of that story 10 years ago about the woman who was awake but paralysed throughout her entire operation, feeling the excruciating pain of every cut, I was quite upbeat.

Fugue

The anaesthetist very kindly gave me a local anaesthetic before inserting the branula. (And I didn’t even ask for it, how kind.) And no one asked me for any New Year countdown. They just said, “Breathe into this oxygen mask” and before I knew it, a very pleasant fugue had descended in my brain and I was out.

The next thing I know, the nurse was gaily chirping, “It’s over.”

Everyone sounds absolutely cheerful in an operating theatre; maybe it’s all that laughing gas. There was no pain whatsoever; the whole thing was, in fact, quite pleasant and I spent the whole day dozing off.

And then I woke up, proper. After that, it was pandemonium. Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will.

You see, there’s a checklist of complications that can quite possibly happen after surgery. Nothing to do with the doctors, it’s just one of those things that happen to hapless people . . . like me.

I woke up to find half my face paralysed. It’s a most uncomfortable sensation. You can’t blink or close your eye and you can’t smile. You can’t even open your mouth wide enough to bite into a burger. I’d read about this side effect for procedures like mine. Apparently, it happens to about 50% of people. But when you read about such things, you don’t think it would happen to you.

“I’m not a statistic,” you want to say. “Am I?”

“Uh,” I said, trying to wink and blink at the same time and ending up looking like a starry-eyed alien instead, “Will this get better?” In the mirror, my affected eye was acutely smaller than the other one, and the eyebrow was several notches lower. I resembled something a tractor had run over. Twice.

Night of the living dead

“Of course,” they assured me. “Your facial nerve was stretched during surgery to get it out of the way. Now, it’s very picky; it doesn’t like being stretched. Most people recover in two weeks.”

It was lovely to have my husband make a fuss over me. But on Day Five, my husband said, “You know, your swelling looks all huge and red, like a ripe tomato.”

I replied airily, “Oh, that’s just normal healing. You don’t know anything.”

On Day Seven, the “healing” popped and burst itself through four stitches, leaking pus all over my hair. I looked like something out of the Night of the Living Dead. I finally acceded to go to the house of my friend, a doctor, on no less than a public holiday.

“Why didn’t you come earlier?” she screeched.

“Didn’t want to bother anyone,” I said sheepishly, leaking pus all over her patio.

It seemed I had an abscess the size of a fist and it had to be drained. Twice a day. Squeezed out and emptied like a lemon. I had no pain surrounding the surgery, and this was the most painful part of the whole process.

I topped myself up with so many antibiotics and painkillers I gave myself diarrhoea.

After a week of milking, my abscess gave up its pulpy ghost. And then, to celebrate, I went out for a nice meal with friends. After 15 minutes of chewing, something trickled down my neck from my wound.

“Gakkk!” my husband jumped. “It’s saliva!”

Welcome to complication No. 203: I had saliva leaking from my wound. My friends were giving me surreptitious looks, no doubt thinking of decapitated monsters capable of spitting from more places than one.

When I finally went back for review with the surgeon, he patted me on the back. “Don’t worry, it’s all part of the normal recovery process. At least you can be assured it’s not cancer. Some people have more complications than others. I thought you’d said you read all about it on the Internet before the surgery.”

I said, “Gakkk.”

So now my wound has finally closed up beautifully. My nerve is recovering in stages – not in two weeks, but two months, more like. And if anyone again tells me they’re worried about surgery, I’d say, “The actual surgery was a piece of cake!” And refer them to this article.

Then again, it would’ve probably only happened to me.