My Operation
Well, I dunno if you knew this already, but I’ve just been in for an operation. Here’s all the details:
For a few months now I have had some breathing problems. It felt like a very heavy cold… except blowing my nose didn’t help. The doctor did some allergy tests, put me on antibiotics, but nothing worked.
Eventually my doctor, Mr. Habashi, booked me in for a CT scan. Yes, the one where you lie down on a stretcher and go through a revolving tunnel to scan your insides. The one that costs thousands of pounds per scan - good thing for private healthcare, eh?
So I had a CT X-Ray scan done of my sinuses and nose. A week later, Mr. Habashi called me in and showed me the damage. Essentially, there were two problems with my upper breathing system:
1) My sinuses (little pockets of air behind your cheeks) had become blocked with extra flesh. There was also some sort of infection there, causing some nasty pus to build up as well (nothing you can see from the outside).
2) My nose septum (the bone bit that separates my nose passages from each other) was slightly large on one side, which was restricting my air flow in one of my nostrils (higher up in my nose).
Of course, this meant an operation. Luckily, Mr. Habashi assured me he would perform both pieces of surgery in one sitting. The big snag was that I wasn’t allowed to interact with other people for 10 days after the operation, which meant missing school, as well as all the other activities I do. Therefore, we timed it so that I would miss the last four days of school before half term, plus the whole of the half term itself. That way, no-one gets hurt (except for my nose).
I am writing this two days after the operation. On Tuesday (the first day I wasn’t in school) I arrived at BMI North London Hospital (I am told this is the nicest hospital around our area) at 7:00 AM. I was given a lovely little cosy room to myself, with my name on the door. There were a couple of other younger children also going in for surgery, so I had to spend quite a lot of time waiting around.
In the meantime, I had to put on a hospital gown and the nurse(s) applied special cream to the backs of my hands to make them numb, in preparation for the tube they were going to insert there in order to quickly be able to inject any medicines or anything they needed to. I had two nurses - both of them called Sue. One did the day shifts, the other did the night shifts. My weight, blood pressure etc. were checked - and no I am not fat.
Then the operation came. They raised the sidebars of my hospital bed and wheeled me into a lift, down to the operating theatre. We stopped in a little room outside the op theatre, chock full of medical instruments. The nurse wired me up to check my oxygen levels and whatnot, then they inserted a tube into my numbed hand. This was the fun part - they injected the anesthetic into my arm (I couldn’t feel it, I was numbed remember?) and I was off to the land of nod. I was told I would feel something cold running up my arm - I felt nothing.
After about eight seconds, my eyes started going out of focus (just like they do on television) and then it went black. My dad later told me that my eyes were still half open after this, but I couldn’t remember anything after this.
When I woke up, dizzy and confused, I was in the recovery room (the room that the patients sit in before they are ready to return to their room). Once again, the nurse (this was day-time Sue, by the way) clipped a sensor to my index finger and checked my oxygen levels. A short while later, I was carted off back into a new room, where I was to sleep.
I was very, very dizzy and could hardly keep my eyes open, thanks to the anesthetic. But the op was a success… so I am told. We just have to trust doctors, eh?
From then on, the nurse (day-time Sue still) checked my oxygen levels every hour, and gave me several pills to swallow; antibiotics, paracetamol, that kind of stuff. Luckily for me, I was used to taking pills from the doses I had before the CT Scan, so it wasn’t a problem for me.
The meals looked nice, but I couldn’t taste much, thanks to two large, rubbery things stuffed up my nose to stop it from bleeding too much. Don’t ask what they looked like. I had a cheese and tomato toastie for lunch (my operation was about 10:30) and then my family came to visit me. Before this, it was just my mum there, but now school had finished, and my two sisters, dad and grandparents turned up.
We talked a bit, then it was dinner time. My family went downstairs to the canteen to eat, leaving me to try and get some shut-eye in my room. Unfortunately, the waitress decided to barge in and present me with a plate of salmon, peas and new potatoes, with a biscuit-and-cheese platter for dessert. Shame I just wanted to sleep.
I had a cute little TV mounted to the wall with a DVD player, on which I played a pirate copy of Mr. Bean’s Ultimate Disaster Movie. The nurse had trouble leaving the room, her eyes were fixed to Mr. Bean comically trying to shag the toilet handryer.
Night-time was hell. I had to continually breathe through my mouth, as I had the rubbery things in my nose (the nurse called them “packs”. I didn’t.), which meant my mouth kept getting dry. This, combined with the fact the nurse kept coming in every single hour to check my oxygen levels, guaranteed I didn’t sleep.
In the morning I had some rice crispies, a yoghurt and I’ve forgotten the third thing. The nurse (the other one now, as the shift had changed) removed the tube from my hand and the “packs” from my nose. I still couldn’t breathe, my nose was chock-a-block with bloody mucus.
We were given various creams and other bits and bobs to use at home, then I was dispatched. Once at home, I felt pretty grisly, so I just played on the computer all day (I managed to install this blog system, for instance). Later I watched Ratatouille with Leila and Maia, and then an early night. Zzzzzzz….
Sleeping was still difficult. I fell asleep at about 11:30, then woke up again at 2:00 in the morning. After a quick dash to the toilet and some more paracetamol, I slept again until 7:00. Which brings us to Thursday - today, as I write this. Miss Fradley photocopied me some sheets so I wouldn’t miss anything, so I spent some of the day working through “speed, distance time”, “speed, distance, time”, “speed, distance, time”.
Meanwhile, my nose has not yet shown any signs of clearing. Mr. Habashi did say that it would feel as though I had a heavy cold until it had cleared, so I am feverishly waiting to be able to breathe properly through my nose. For the first time in almost a year.