No Muscle and Pain Medicine
My parents had rented a hotel room in the hospital for the first month of my transplant. Several of my family members would stay there and take turns taking care of me on the transplant floor. My body had used up whatever muscle I had left when I was in the ICU, trying to stay alive. Since I hadn’t been eating, my body was using my muscle as a fuel source in order to keep me breathing. Upon waking, I could not move my legs at all. This is probably why I imagined them chained to the bed. I could lift my arms just a little bit. I was confined to my bed. I needed 24/7 care. I had frequent insomnia. My feet often felt like they were on fire. I would wake up whoever was sleeping in my room that night, to either pull my socks off, or put them back on. No one ever got much sleep during the night.
The recovery process was long and hard. Although I did not need oxygen after the surgery, I clung to it like a safety blanket for some time. My chest felt like there was a belt buckled tightly around it from where I had had my clamshell incision. I drifted in and out of sleep a lot. I would often wake up or fall asleep to seeing people sitting in chairs by my bedside. Even though my eyes were closed, I could see them there. It felt like they were watching over me. I would almost always wake up talking to people as if it took me a while to wake up fully from my dreams. They weren’t typical dreams, as I rarely spend much time talking to anyone in my dreams. I know this was a side effect of the pain medicine, but it felt comforting. When I was awake, I often just kept my eyes closed. I wanted to escape the pain and confinement to my bed. I tried my best to stay on top of my pain medicine. I had an epidural, and could press a button after a certain amount of time went by, to deliver another dose of pain medicine. Sometimes the pain was just beyond what I could tolerate but I had no choice but to endure it. There were endless amounts of nebulizers that I had to do. I was nebulizing antibiotics and antifungals and probably even bronchodilators. Even though I just laid there with the nebulizer attached to my face via a mask, I really hated doing them. I just wanted to sleep. Sleeping was tough too, because I am a side sleeper, and at this time, I had to sleep on my back, due to my chest tubes and broken sternum. I was also on IV antibiotics several times a day as I had an infection in my new lungs, which came from my old lungs. I also needed IV's to combat the CMV that came with the lungs.
(arterial blood gas shunt bruise and yellow hand from the medicine?)
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