Chapter 3
All in all, I stayed in the private room for around four days. When they took my drain out, they warned me it might hurt, but mostly it feels weird.
And how! I can’t explain just how peculiar having a long plastic tube pulled from inside your abdomen feels. The strangeness is compounded by how long it goes on for — that felt like a lot of tubing, I ran out of breath to exhale while they were doing it. But it was out, and I was almost free. Getting the catheter out took another couple of days. And now I know how catheters stay inside a person. Something I never intended to find out, but there you go.
I knew I was definitely getting better (even if my digestive system was only working to rule) when they announced they were moving me to a four-bed ward. I still had IV drips of various descriptions, though — antibiotics, Paracetamol, plain old sodium chloride. My arms had swollen and my hands felt twice their normal size, with the skin stretched so tight they were beginning to hurt. It hadn’t even occurred to me that this might happen, and I tried to start moving my hands and fingers.
Yeah. My feet and ankles were pudgy, too. My knees were obese.
The result of my swollen hands and arms was that when they needed to put in a new cannula, they couldn’t find a vein. And they needed to put in new cannulas a few times because the old ones would stop working. I had one on the back of each hand at one point. Then the one on my right hand started leaking, so it was removed (yay! One hand free).
All this time, I’d been telling the doctors and nurses to use my right arm for the various needle-led indignities they were putting me through as I’m left-handed. Sadly, they seemed to favour my left arm instead. The cannula in my left hand finally gave out, and the last one was inserted into the crook of my left elbow late one evening.
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