This Had Better Be the End of It!!!!!

Back in November I posted about my aborted Hawaiian vacation when I had peritonitis and they had to remove my PD catheter and give me a hemo one, and I’ve been on hemo ever since.

Back in April I posted that I had another PD catheter inserted, but that it wasn’t working properly.

May 12 doc calls me and says we need to go back in again and there’s an opening on May 13. Piece of cake. Go in, check out the adhesions and make sure placement is ok, then cut about an inch off my interior catheter so it will be more taut. In at 8, in post-op at 9, home by 12 or 1. That was certainly the plan.

So, I show up at 8 and go into surgery. In the recovery room I wake up and everything seems hunky dory. All of a sudden I hear a nurse use my name and the words “overnight stay” in the same sentence. Huh? I ask the nurse next to me what time it is and she says 2:15. WTF?

? A little while later one of the PD nurses comes down, they find a private post-op room, and she dialyzes me. Catheter works fine. She mentions something about a 2-5 night stay. Ok, I’m really PO’d now.

Around 5 doc comes in and says when he went into the abdomen, he found the adhesions had engulfed the catheter much like a white blood cell would do to an invading bacteria. He had to remove the catheter, clean it thoroughly, reinsert it and then open a can of whup ass on the remaining adhesions. Of course, he also took the inch off the catheter.

Due to the number of sutures he had to put in the peritoneum, I have to spend the next 5 days in bed, at a 30 degree angle, to keep the fluid level where he wants it. How fun, I get to use a bed pan for 5 days. During this entire week, he keeps telling me he’s going to release me to nephrology for “retraining” on the cycler. Although I repeatedly tell him I think I will be too week and disoriented to do this, his response is always, “I have every confidence in you.” So, that’s precisely what happened on May 19.

I know what you’re thinking – thus endeth the story. Ha! You forget, I’m the IHD Ginsu knife lady, “but wait, there’s more.”

I sit through my retraining (which, by the way is to run all week),quietly complaining of feeling weak, lightheaded, and generally walking like a Neanderthal; and around 4 pm everyone said “see you tomorrow,” and let me go. Mind you, three of the nurses there had dialyzed me during the week at the hospital..

My friend met me at the elevator, walked me to her car, I took a step off the curb and fell and (yup, you guessed it) fractured my left hip. I must have a pretty high tolerance for pain, as I actually walked on it until Thursday before it dawned on me that I might have broken it. Several X-rays, a CT scan and an orthopedist later, the verdict was in. I had surgery on Friday, and even got to hear them screw in the screws (spinal).

Total count: 7 surgeries in 6 months
3 surgeries within 24 days
The look on the face of doc “I have every confidence in you” when he showed up at post-of to see how I was doing (he was not the surgeon of record) – PRICELESS!