Tag Archives: Surgery

Fighting Or Giving Up

A Symphony in Beeps

No dark tunnel materialized and no bright light, nor familiar voices whispering through a filmy barrier. Instead I stood on a beach in broad daylight. And I knew this beach well. The sand cushioned my bare feet while a stiff plank ran the length of my back, from my head to my ankles. “It’s a surf board” my mind explained, “see, your’e on a beach.” The location made sense. A still lake spread to my right, Cocolalla Lake in northern Idaho where I spent all my summers as a kid.

But in reality I was anesthetized, undergoing surgery at the University of Utah in Salt Lake. My colon had perforated that morning, and as I later learned my body was strapped down to a table. Still, while under I found myself in an alternative consciousness, standing on the shore of life and death.

The hardness of the board impeded easy movement, but I could shift my eyes side to side, and my feet just a little. To my left, seated on a rock wall, waited my ex-husband. That was not a good thing. Marriage to him had been difficult. He wasn’t a serious husband or father. Sadly enough his behaviors were fixed, and after our divorce he continued along his destructive path, succumbing to an early death about a year before I went under the knife. 

But at that moment he lounged on those rocks very much alive, watching me intently.

Wearing pink nylon shorts, a baggy white tank top, and flip flops, he continued to stare. Finally he spoke, “Hi Gail.” 

I reacted with contempt thinking, “Oh, Hell No!” If staying with him is what’s in store I’m not sticking around here. That’s when I shifted my eyes in the other direction, to my right where my son waited for me wading in the still, shallow water.

My son is very much alive, and I was glad to see him.

In tiny steps akin to a Tim Conway comedy skit, I made my move ignoring the guy on the seawall, shuffling instead toward my son.

Flash to the following morning when I awoke in the intensive care unit at the U hospital. With a tube forced down my throat, my wrists tied to the side bars, my daughter stood over me with worry etched in her face. She and the ICU nurse both spoke as I struggled to convey I wanted that plastic obstruction out of my wind pipe. 

This hospital stay extended to seven days, with a repeat admission shorty after due to a related complication. The holiday season fizzled out as I was in poor shape and trying to recover..

It now has been over two months since surgery and that strange vision. The intubation tube is long gone and I am sporting a colostomy bag with a slowly healing incision down the middle of my gut. Bye bye belly button. The Home Health nurses visited every day for nearly six weeks packing gauze into two fissures pitted along an incompletely healed stomach. 

On one particular visit the nurse explained that I had indeed been strapped to a hard foam-core table in the operating room. My head, torso and legs were firmly secured down so as not to move during the procedure. But in my mind I did visit another place, a vivid locale somewhere between giving in or fighting back.

This Tuesday I will celebrate my 71st birthday, and I truly welcome the day. I have children and grandchildren who all mean the world to me. Ahead there’s athletic events, recitals, graduations, and with a little luck a wedding or two.

Besides I can’t kick the bucket right now, I must do what I can to help save the Republic and see Trump behind bars.

There is still much to do.

Delirium

To maintain that we fell back to sleep after talking to the oncologist, would overstate the minutes until the next phone call.  Our rest was uneasy, more trance-like accompanied by surreal images.  Soon the strained quiet shattered, when the anticipated second call arrived.  This time my sleep had been thin, and finding the phone a simple matter.  It lay where I had placed it no more than forty-five minutes earlier.  Again, for a second time that night, my girl and I lurched straight up in bed.  And for this call my voice flowed clearly, warmed up from the previous conversation.

“Hello.”

“Mrs. Chumbley?”  I am Dr. blah blah.” (Sorry)  “Your husband requires emergency surgery on his colon as a life saving procedure.  I can’t perform the operation without your permission.”

“Yes, of course.  You have my permission.  Thank you doctor.  Should I come down to the hospital?”

“This surgery can take hours.  The morning should be soon enough.”

“Thank you again, doctor.”

“You’re welcome.  Someone will call if there are any problems.”  My silent translation, “if he dies.”

I hung up the phone, and lay back down.  We both silently thought our thoughts, worried our worries, until lightly drifting off.

A thin sleep resumed.  Mine was filled the strangest dreams of the classroom, childhood friends, my parents.

Promptly, at six o’clock, I opened my eyes, just to roll over and see Catherine’s pretty blues looking straight back at me.  “We should get down there,” she whispered.

Quickly dressing, she drove me back to the hospital.  And though still very early, the day promised to be another scorcher.  She asked, “Do you want me to come up with you?”

I thought for a moment and then I told her no.  Not yet. I needed to see how he looked and what the surgeon had to say about his condition.  “You go back to bed, honey,” I encouraged.  ” I will call when I know something.”

That decision proved to be a good one.  When I found the ICU, his nurse explained to me that though he had survived colon surgery, Chad was still dangerously septic, in critical condition.  When I pulled back the turquoise curtain to his room, the body in the bed bore little resemblance to the guy I married.

This ravaged body bore testimony to his own hellish night of scalpels, staples, and anesthesia.  Now under an induced coma, his bloated and distorted figure would have better suited my earlier, anxious dreams, than the cold reality of morning.