On June the 4th I had surgery on my lady parts, it was a laparoscopic surgery, that's where they put gas in your body to move your organs, and then they go in with long needle like tools and cameras. Well during this surgery the doctor perforated my colon which caused me to get an abscess (pocket of infection) which in turn caused my colon to become inflamed.
When I got home from the surgery I was feeling groggy still from the anesthesia so I did not notice anything at that point. Once the anesthesia wore off I felt a tremendous pain in my right side. I started to freak out I was telling my mother and sister something was not right, they just figured it was normal pain from after the surgery and gave me pain pills. I was bent over the kitchen table just walking my feet back and forth like a cat kneading telling them over and over something was seriously wrong.
A few days after the surgery I developed a high fever of 101 or 102, so I called the doctor and he told me to go to the ER. MY mother was unable to drive me to the hospital so I took myself, which meant I could not take my pain pills, so I was suffering. Once I got to the ER they took my blood work and my urine and made me wait in the waiting room. Well by this point I was in extreme pain and sitting only exasperated that, so I went and asked them if they could get me a cot, or anything so I could just lay down, they would not. I looked so bad that 4 different people also waiting for treatment went several times and asked them to get me a cot to lie down .. many hours of waiting in excruciating pain I could not take it any longer and I left, my mother had called the hospital and they said they would call if anything showed up in my blood work. Well I never got that call and the raging infection in my body would have shown up in my blood work as elevated white blood cells.
On the 12th I had an appointment with the doctor who preformed the surgery. I went into the exam room and he looked me over. While in his office when we were talking about the results of the surgery and how I have been healing I asked him if he had done anything on my right side because I have been having intense pain on my right side, he said he had not and left it at that.
So here I am in excruciating pain pretty much being told nothing is wrong with me, so I just feel like I am being a big baby. I am trying to just go on with my life and do normal things as if nothing is the matter with me; meanwhile a ragging infection is taking over my colon.
Saturday rolls around and I went on a picnic with the guy I am seeing, we go take some pictures at a few different spots in concord and have a nice little dinner over in the grass at Old North Bridge. This deer came within 15 yards of us and just hung out for about 45 minutes, it was really an amazing experience. So we finish up there pack up our things and head home.
The pain in my stomach kept getting worse and worse till I at last asked Peter if he would look online and find out where the apendics is. We found a site and all of my symptoms were that of an appendicitis, I just brush it off, I was afraid but I did not want to go to the ER for a 3rd time and be told nothing was the matter with me so I just went to sleep. Apparently I was moaning and crying out in pain, so Peter started to become aware just how serious things were so with the help of his room mates they peer pressured me into going to the hospital again.
When we got to the hospital they took me right back to a room, at last someone in the medical field realized I was actually going through something serious. At first they all thought it was an appendicitis but once the CAT scan came back they knew it was something else. They admitted me to the hospital, but they were being very vague and not really telling me why. So Peter suggested that I call the doctor who did my surgery, so I had him paged. When he called me back, and I told him what was going on and asking him if he could call up the hospital and try and get some answers, his response was "this has nothing to do with the surgery", he told me that it was just gastro interjectional, that I should go home and I would be fine in 24 hours. He also told me I had said nothing to him about pain when I had scene him at our appointment.
The treatment I received at the hospital from the doctors was great. They wanted to treat me as minimally invasive as they could because the alternative would be a major surgery where I would end up losing a lot of my colon. That is still up in the air though even at this point, if my body does not continue to respond to the antibiotics and if this does not clear up they will still have to do surgery. Its pretty scary still having that over my head after being released from my 6 day jail cell.
The system they have with the nursing staff and the nurses assistants leaves a lot to be desired. When you would push the button to get help some angry woman would come in, not even make eye contact with you or speak to you, would just walk over and turn off your call light. You would have to tell them your problem and hope that they would relay it to someone who would actually do something about it. I wound up having a bad allergic reaction to one of the drugs they gave me; it took over 3 hours for me to get any kind of response to that. My IV would break down and I would need a new one almost everyday, and it would take hours for them to do it, so I would be left for hours sitting there in pain while they took their time to get around to me.
So all and all after all of this I am very pissed about what happened to me, I don't know what I am going to do about it, in the very least I am going to talk to the board at the hospital where I first went to the ER and where the surgery was done. How many people do they put through this, how many of them end up dead?
