Buy the ticket, take the ride. --Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I struggled awake as the morning nurse bustled around me, all friendliness and efficiency; she changed the bag on my IV stand, shoved a thermometer in my mouth, measured my blood oxygen with a clamp that closed over my finger, asked for my pain scale number, and cuffed my arm to take my blood pressure. This ritual was to be repeated every 4-6 hours for the rest of my stay. Casually, she glanced at my foot, swathed completely in gauze and bandages.
“Oh, is this an amputation?” She asked, as if she’d asked, “Oh, is it raining today?”
IT BETTER NOT BE!!!
When she left I shoved myself upwards in bed and probed the bandages for toes. They were painful, but present and accounted for. Oh, relief. My breath rasped from my swollen abraded throat—ah, that would be the intubation while I was under during surgery, they’d warned me about that. There was a merciful relief, though—the nurses had given me a huge yellow plastic sippy cup, complete with a bendy straw, full of ice water. The heartening effect of simple ice water is difficult to overestimate, when you’re flat out in a hospital bed, attached by tubes to beeping machines, with a dry raspy mouth and pain radiating in great electric pulses up your leg. The ice offers cool, crunchy, wet solace, flooding through the parched mouth and throat. Something as small as the cup of chipped ice they gave Termagant to feed me after I came to in the operating room—such a delicious kindness. Of course, the more ice water you drink, the sooner you have to use the bedpan…
Hanging out at the Highland Hotel
My nearest neighbor across the next pink curtain was Miss Fox, a cranky woman with stomach cancer and a knowledge of the ways of surviving in the hospital. “You seem alright,” she said, “and quiet. I’m getting moved from this four-person crowded bullshit business into a double room. Why don’t you come too? My last roommate sucked, I had to kick her out.”
And when the orderlies came to move her bed, we talked them into dragging me along. Soon enough, and grateful to the pushiness of Miss Fox, we were in a quieter, more peaceful space.
I spent most of the day dazed, not quite believing I was there, trying to wrap my skull and my heart around the strange new truth of my broken body. Flowers were delivered, from my mom and grandma; Termagant came, bringing some flowers of her own, to sit by my side, talking quietly and holding my hand; she’d also brought useful things like my cell phone, lotion, and chapstick, as well as a stack of books to help ease the time by. When your world shrinks to the size of your bed and what you can reach with it, small things loom large in comfort and importance—and Termagant is a compassionate master of such details.
I began to adapt, too, to the rhythms of the hospital—the movements of the nurses, having my vitals taken every 4-6 hours, here-take-this-pill, the beeps of machinery and the groans of pain from other patients and the rolling in and out of the gurneys, the endless questions—where are you on the pain scale?
My medieval-style perforated steel half-cast, strapping in my foot
In the depths of the night, long after visiting hours, Termagant slipped out, leaving me to sleep. Of course, the midnight shift change woke me up. And the great slow rhythm of chronic pain had begun to tune up, of course. The foot throbbed, and a low burn began. I asked the evening nurse, an older woman with a seamed face and an embittered manner, if I might have some pain meds, really, just a little something to take the edge off…and she looked at me as if I were a junkie, with suspicion and disgust. Then she looked at my chart, said, “well, the doctors didn’t approve anything for you,” and walked out. I was stunned. I’d been tough last night, sure, but the pain was creeping up the great thermometer into the hot zone, and I’d been assured by the docs that it was better to ask for meds than to suffer and mess up the healing process.
An hour more, and the pain was coming in great hot waves, closer and closer together, with less and less downtime in between. My breath was changing, getting shallower as I tried to cope. And I was ashamed for not being tougher. Pain often peaks, I remembered, at 3 days post accident. This, I reflected, was day 2. Here we go.
Two hours more, and I was watching the minutes pass like melting ice, practicing my breathing meditation (in through the nose, long and slow—out through the mouth). I’d handled this intensity yesterday, after all…and I had a quiet little mantra I’d repeat to myself, reassuring my brain that time was passing, and this would pass, too. I tried hard to turn my thoughts away from the wires affixed through the skin and deep into my broken bones, the stabbing of fragments of bone gravel into my inflamed flesh, the long fasciotomy incisions I hadn’t even seen yet, red mouths gaping in silent screams…
Another hour and I was panting, twisting the sheets in my hands, squirming uncontrollably, pain wracking my whole body in great spasms. My foot felt as if I were dipping it in lava, or that it might explode. I was having trouble keeping cognition together, brain spinning wildly off on fearful tangents (it’s always gonna be like this, infection will set in, you’ll never ride again on those horribly broken bones…) My eyesight started to waver, my ears started that great rushing sound, my hands felt buzzy and weak. I was going into shock from the pain. Feeling hot shame, I pressed the call button. And this time, many long minutes later, it was the charge nurse who answered; but she, too, in her soft Caribbean tones, told me that she didn’t understand why, especially for such an injury, but the doctors had gone home for the night leaving no prescription for pain meds.
“Not even an ibuprofen? I’m having a really tough time…”
“I’m so sorry, ma’am, but I can’t.”
No mercy. I couldn’t handle it any more, and I broke down, helplessly, fighting back sobs, but tears flooded my eyes and down my cheeks anyway. Humiliation on top of pain.
“I’m so sorry, ma’am, I’ll see what I can do.” The door closed.
I gathered myself as best I could, huddling in my pain cave, and resolved that I would last the night, I had to last the night, I would just have to stretch…when the door came open and the light flicked on unexpectedly. It was the cranky old nurse, but she had syringes in her hand.
“Charge nurse called the doctor until he woke up and answered,” she sniffed, “and they said you could have 1 ml of Dilaudid.” She tried to stuff the saline flush and the narcotic into my arm, but in my writhings, the needle of my IV had kinked. With brisk impatience, she grabbed another IV kit, and another, and then another…stabbing, fishing, sweeping beneath the skin, stabbing all the way through my dehydrated veins and forcing bubbles of saline beneath my skin. I tried not to squirm, I bit my lips, I breathed, and more tears rolled across my face while I tried not to punch her, or to scream. Blood trickled down my arms and hands. Finally, she admitted defeat.
“I’ll go get someone else.”
Yes, please the heathen gods, do that. The next nurse stabbed me quickly, easily, and flushed the new port with saline, then with Dilaudid. After the cold of the meds trickled up my arms, making my skin crawl, a flush of nausea washed through, with a sickly, shivering rush that poured through my muscles. A thick, sticky-feeling sweat started through my pores. But the muscles I’d been knotting in pain relaxed, despite me, and the howl and the burn retreated back to their corner, leaving a low, drumming hurt. I sighed. Now, with the edge off, I waited more patiently through the night hours.
As dawn crept across the ceiling of the room, I fell into a sweating, shivering sleep. The Night Of Pain was done.
. It's about time that you don't become bothered with having to get up to crack a bull whip, so master that from the bed/couch/etc. 
This should be a good excuse to read a hell of a lot of books, and maybe write up my Alaska trip at last--though it may be rather painful to recall from my current imprisonment.
