How to survive hip surgery at Ellis and learn to enjoy it

(from the NAMI Schenectady newsletter, May-June 2010)
It's 8:40 am. They've had me in pre-op two hours already, taken my clothes and wallet and glasses and dressed me in a johnny shirt. Abruptly, someone grabs my bed and pushes me roughly into the hall, zigzagging along as I study the ceiling tiles flashing by overhead. They come to a plain door in the hall and it opens and they wheel me into bright lights. What a disappointing little room with a few scattered people flitting by and a few tables for apparatus. Imagine—this is the core of the hospital—the grand operating theatre, where people survive or die at the hands of skilled surgeons while nurses watch the blips of electronic machines and liquids in translucent bags flow silently into the body to keep vital life signs going. Like we see on the hospital shows on TV. The eerie aura of life and death hanging in the balance is in there and it's unsettling unless you put it out of mind and take as comfort that you are in the hands of the best people we have,the best trained, the best team, the latest equipment. I say to myself: Brother, I trust. I feel special in the center of the room. They've whisked me out of my bed onto a narrow bench or table. I could almost fall off of this it's so small. Is that the best they can do? I thought. They whisper hello. I think it's the anesthetist who now greets me. They're assuming positions around me. He clamps a plastic mask over my nose and mouth, lifts it off and says, you'll be out in a few seconds. I'm not out right then, but the mask comes down again and I'm off in dreamland.

Next—it seemed an eternity later--I woke up in post-op, with a head full of cuddly dreams and imaginings of stars and moons. How are you feeling? Someone asked, the same question I would receive umpteen times a day from now on. I felt like I'd been away a long time. They took me by gurney to my room on A-3, post-surgery and somehow slipped me into my bed where I slept for hours. Then hospital life begins: the first night or two they wake you just about every hour to take vital signs--blood pressure, pulse, and temperature (the last is done by machine with a swipe of your forehead—no more thermometer under the tongue. Someone from the hospital lab comes in at 5 or 6 am to wake you and draw your blood, every day. The nurses and student nurses who crowded into my room ask me questions and have to write everything down. They check my dressing. My hip surgery went well—the incision is clean and untroubled with a cross hatching of dark staples down its length, like repair after a shark's bite. The housekeeper even woke me at 6 one morning to introduce herself. The day nurses streamed in and out, 18 or 20 separate visits the first day, inquiring, soothing, wordlessly doing their chores. They push a console with a laptop computer on it and spend awhile pushing the screen to record my vital signs and assess my condition. Out in the hall they're doing more of that, nurses studying their computer screens and punching keys. That's modern nursing.

My bed is wide and comfortable and above my head is a line of switches for them to turn lights on or off. They can elevate or lower my bed's upper half. I have a phone to order my meals and a remote control for the thin-screen high-def tv on the wall. This must be the queen suite in Ellis Hospital, armed to the teeth with modern technology. I'm hooked up to an intravenous line with a fluid bag hanging overhead on a metal tree with an electronic contraption blinking out red or green numbers on its face. Then there's the pump. It's ingenious, a small plastic grip with a button on it in bed alongside your hip which you press whenever you feel pain. Well, every body knows after getting part of you removed you're going to feel pain and so you push that pump pretty darn often. The line from the pump goes up to an overhead bag with liquid dilaudid, an opiate narcotic that Ellis chooses to use as its main pain mollifier, in place of pills and other injections that have been used in the past. Imagine—no pills, just push the pump and feel instant relief. It invites odious comparisons with the appeal for instant gratification that junkies must feel with their drugs on the outside. This is more humane, of course, to comfort us, to let us know our every tremor and ache can nevertheless bring peace of mind. (Oh, to have the drug maker's contract with hospitals that issue this magical drug.)

As the days grow and I begin to feel less pain and more like a human being, they talk of discharging me, first to Sunnyview and then home. But there's a catch—my MVP Gold insurance doesn't cover rehab at Sunnyview for some reason so they cant get me in there even though the head discharge nurse says, we're going to take you down there Saturday morning and roll you through the gates. They were stopped before they started. So Ellis goofed here, they suggested I go home only three days after my surgery and that wouldn't work. Why should someone at home do the rehab and close care that's needed so soon after? Rehab is part of the process of getting better—daily exercise and attention to each step of the way. And you don't dump people back home right away. The compromise,which suited me, was to have a home-duty visiting nurse-physical therapist come to our house several times after I finally left the hospital after the weekend. She put me through my paces and this worked well, thanks to Visiting Nurse Service (bless them for what they do).

Now, it's much later when I write this, three weeks after the big event. I can sit up and type on the computer and answer the phone, even with the last of the aches and pains coming from my rump. Oh, still I long for the pleasures of the Ellis pump, the assurance it gave each of us, the lofty, dreamy feelings it created. I remember I couldn't read the first few days in hospital while taking that stuff. My mind wouldn't concentrate, my eyes wouldn't focus on the page, they ran off to other lines of text. I thought it was me but it was the drug. Anyway, if you're thinking of surgery at Ellis, you'll have the chance to enter dreamland like I did and you'll make it through, thanks to the pump. (Roy Neville, April 30)