#major surgery

Spencer is out and recovering. He still has a drain in, but it’s normal surgical drain fluids, not the opaque lymphatic fluids. He’s also alert and hungry/thirsty, so, no more IV. Success - for now. We don’t know the next step or what to look out for - conversations we will have when we get him. Still don’t know when we can get him either.

Let me tell you somethings I've learned these last two weeks:

They let people go home from the hospital way too soon. She didn't stay a whole day (about 11 hours from arrival to when we got back to her house). She was still medicated, had muscle blocks, and was sick from the anesthesia when I got her into the chair in her living room. That first night was scary as hell -- I slept on the couch right outside her bedroom door because I was afraid what would happen if she tried to get up in the middle of the night.

The medication they gave her wasn't really enough. They're so worried about her getting addicted to oxy that they gave her a tiny dose, only let her take it every six hours (it took two hours for it to start working and it helped mildly for two hours before disappearing in her system), and tylenol was a joke.

There's no way in hell she could be alone in her house for those first 3-4 days. She has this ice bath thing (like a cooler with an insulated line that runs to a knee wrap) and it's heavy as hell. I've lugged it from chair to bed and back to chair multiple times a day for her, plugging and unplugging it. She has two stairs to get inside the house and none between her bedroom, bath, kitchen, and living room and it was still hard for her to even walk from one to the other for the first 48 hours. All this and they still told her she only needed someone to drive her back and forth.

Getting her to Physical Therapy? Just getting from the house to the car can take five minutes. And try to get into a passenger seat of a low-slung Dodge Challenger (her car; she let me drive it) with a leg that can't bend? Then there's folding up the walker, stowing it in the trunk, pulling up to the front door of the facility, getting the walker out, unfolding it, helping her out of the car, going inside, parking ... it's a ten minute drive from her house to PT and it takes us 30 minutes to get there.

They gave her exercises to do, but no directions or how to do them besides a picture and a how many reps for how long. Riiiiiiight. Eac of her PT people (they have teams of six) have told her different answers to the same questions. Fortunately, she's a stubborn bitch like me and we've researched on our own and figured them out.

I was given this ARC by the publisher in exchange for an Honest Review. I know that this wasn't exactly a Holby City story. And, actually, I quite liked the characters in this story much much more than a lot of the characters that I've seen in the clips of Holby City. But, still, I definitely pictured that hospital while I read this book. As I said, though, this novel is so much better than what happened on the show. Cassie is a former Army Major and her entrance into the story was one of my favorite parts of the novel. She's a Trauma Surgeon and up for Head of Trauma. Veronica is the head of AMU and a general surgeon, although at the start of the novel she feels like she's more a pure administrative person every day. Then Cassie enters the scene and both their lives are changed so much as they get closer and closer. Oh, and then there's a doozy of a subplot. Who's trying to take down Cassie and why. That one kept me guessing just enough to make it enjoyable too. There was a bit more American bashing here and there than I like to see (Actually, pretty much all ERs and EDs in the United States can't just turn down a person in distress and that's why so many of the city ones are in such dire financial straits because they do serve you no matter if you have insurance or not). Thankfully, that sort of thing was just thrown in there by the characters here and there and wasn't a constant thing the characters were harping on. It was a fun book, and a thoroughly enjoyable read.

You got a massive deep itch but the spot where it itches has lost sense of touch, because of all the nerve damage and scratching does

Imagine #34 - Major Surgery

Masterlist

MAJOR SURGERY - Jubileevit

Alb. “The First Cut” (1977)

Personnel: