While injuries, accidental or clinical, I have endured do not number that many, I have always thought myself prepared for their savagery and dismembering. I was wrong. Last Thursday I had my gallbladder out. The surgeon, while conveying to loved ones my positive prognosis, described it as "bad" though I couldn't say I have had any truly bad experiences with it (nor previous tests or the ultrasound showed is as "bad") I guess he knows since he got to keep it and all I got was one lousy stone. Though nauseated and hovering with a blood pressure slightly above dead, I checked myself out to realize I fared rather well. Though my abdomen looked like I had been stabbed by Wolverine's adamantium claws, these wounds were covered over with Super Glue and secure, already on their way to be healed. On my right side was a drain, a bubble collecting all manner of oozing surgical wastes that would be removed before I left the hospital. I could not bring myself to gaze upon this foreign, assumed sterile, hose shoved into my body cavity. Even when it came to its removal, I could not watch. That awkward pulling and adjusting the hose did as it was removed was enough to make me wish I had rather been cut from groin to gullet instead.
With the drain removed and a questionable patching of the gaping wound I left the premises. For the past week I have been consumed by a mania over this wound. The incisions across my chest haven't bothered me in the least. This HOLE in my side has worried me so. No stitches, strips designed to hold wounds shut to allow healing did not seem to keep it concealed. Though the wound didn't seem open to the body cavity any more it was still so deep, white edged, and redly irritated. I am afraid. It's not so much scarring. Thirty three years and the worst I have is a lip that received three stitches when I was four. But therein lies my concern. Lip, though scarred, healed correctly. If a hole stays in your side, how does it heal? I remember a story from school: a Civil War era soldier shot in stomach and a budding scientist tied string to food and lowered it into his body to observe digestion time and lengths. Since it was a hole and not a cut in the man's body there was no way for the wound to grow back together. I know science has developed since then but a hole in the body is a whole in the body. How will this one heal if its medicated binds now fall away and it's left closed yet far from fully healed?
I report today, after all this worry and concern that, y'know, it's really not that deep. Maybe I worried this time for nothing. All that put aside now, I have had two coworkers at the hospital both of whom have had staph infections in relatively benign wounds, one a spider bite on his arm, the other a bee sting to the side of the face. How better will I fair with an open surgical wound in the same infected space as got them?!
With the drain removed and a questionable patching of the gaping wound I left the premises. For the past week I have been consumed by a mania over this wound. The incisions across my chest haven't bothered me in the least. This HOLE in my side has worried me so. No stitches, strips designed to hold wounds shut to allow healing did not seem to keep it concealed. Though the wound didn't seem open to the body cavity any more it was still so deep, white edged, and redly irritated. I am afraid. It's not so much scarring. Thirty three years and the worst I have is a lip that received three stitches when I was four. But therein lies my concern. Lip, though scarred, healed correctly. If a hole stays in your side, how does it heal? I remember a story from school: a Civil War era soldier shot in stomach and a budding scientist tied string to food and lowered it into his body to observe digestion time and lengths. Since it was a hole and not a cut in the man's body there was no way for the wound to grow back together. I know science has developed since then but a hole in the body is a whole in the body. How will this one heal if its medicated binds now fall away and it's left closed yet far from fully healed?
I report today, after all this worry and concern that, y'know, it's really not that deep. Maybe I worried this time for nothing. All that put aside now, I have had two coworkers at the hospital both of whom have had staph infections in relatively benign wounds, one a spider bite on his arm, the other a bee sting to the side of the face. How better will I fair with an open surgical wound in the same infected space as got them?!