Recovery

Recovery the second time was fairly similar to the first. They told me immediately that it had been sucessful, I had been leaking blood from the right hand keyhole, and CBD had stitched it extra hard, stitching it to my muscle (not sure what that meant - but it hurt worse than ever).

I asked, relieved, "oh, so he only reopened one keyhole?"

No, apparently he opened them all. I didn't even ask (didn't think it would help to know!) if he'd re-done the hernia too.

I was given blood at a fairly fast rate in the recovery room; they told me they'd taken 900mils out of my abdomen.

I am very very grateful to CBD for coming out to the hospital on a Friday night, to redo the surgery, rather than wait until the morning, when things could have been much more serious.

As he said later "it is not so much what happens in surgery that matters, but what matters is how we deal with it if it does happen". Very true.

I was finally back up to the ward with a permanent bp machine attached for several hours and a drip and my blood transfusion.

Oh, and thankfully while I was in recovery they offered me a bed pan (all the intravenous fluid going in had left my bladder full) I said no thanks, but did they have a catheter instead. They seemed surprised at my choice, but after a lot of pregnancies urinary cathers are practically second nature, tho I've never used a bedpan in all my 41+ yrs!

I saw the nurse who'd wished me goodnight several hours earlier, and we both smiled and I said "it has been a long night". Yes she agreed.

I asked, and my bp had been down to 70/40 and hb to 7 right after surgery, which explained why the blood was given so fast.

I was on oxygen through one of these nasal tubes for the rest of the night.

Another praise is that when I got into recovery, one of the ward nurses called dh and told him it was all safely over (2am) so he could go to bed now, without worrying. So when I got back to the ward she told me she'd told him I was ok, so not to worry about trying to ring him now. So I slept.