Back To Healing

Righto, back to my recovery. I apologize for being a little late. Having been doing too well lately due to my back. Sleep has been very little.


Where was I?....right, the recovery unit.


After that whole piss smell mishap things.....stabled out.

I'd push myself hard in my recovery. I'd do laps on the ward every few hours. I started out doing 2 laps, than 4, than 8, than I stopped counting and went for time. I ended up doing 2 hours of hard walking every couple of hours. I was in extreme pain while doing this but every step I took I reminded myself that I had to earn this gift. My body wouldn't just accept it.

I'll be honest here, I kept telling myself that only to deal with the pain, the fact is, I loved being able to walk again. After every session I'd go into my room and cry my ass off because I wasn't coughing anymore. I wasn't spitting up blood, black phlegm or coughing to the point where I vomit and then pass out. Not at all. It was the best thing I had felt in a lot time.

Between rests, some of the Nurses proved that they deserve their shitty pay checks. A few of the incidents that I can remember were as follows.

The first one, while I was still on IV was when the heat in my room broke and got hotter and hotter in my room. The nurses who were working at the time were like 80 year old Portuguese women who couldn't see 2 feet in front of them. I should also mention it's like 11am so it's bright as hell out on the ward.

Now, the nurses come in my room to see what's wrong, they look at the thermostat and mess with it a bit. They aren't sure if you had to twist it right or left to lower the heat, they tried both. Then one of the Nurses had a brilliant idea of getting a flash light. A FUCKING FLASH LIGHT AT 11AM. She thought that would help them see and the whole while I'm saying "Call Maintenance, call maintenance". They didn't listen to me for atleast an hour and the whole time the heat in my room is climbing, getting hotter and hotter.

I couldn't exactly just leave my room till they fixed it because I was fresh out of the ICU and germs were still an issue for me.

So, after an hour of them being the dumbest people I've ever seen, they finally call Maintenance. He walks in, looks at the thing, goes "Oh", walks off, does something, fixes it. The heat shoots back down to normal in minutes.

The next incident I came remember was when I was being switched from IV Anti-rejection to Oral. My first time taking my Oral pills is at night, I'm panicking myself because I'm scared as shit. My life is literally in my own hands. If I miss one pill session this early I could probably cause my body to go into rejection. That's not easy on the mind.

I'm getting more and more nervous as the night goes on and gets closer to my pill time.

When the time comes, I ask the Nurse for a drink and tell her that Water isn't enough to help swallow these massive pills.

She leaves, comes back, and I shit you not. She hands me SOMEONE ELSES FUCKING HALF DRANK drink. I ask her if she was serious and she nods like it's okay. This is like 4 days out of surgery too, mind you. This wasn't 2 weeks or something where my body had a chance to get some immune system back. This is 4 days of having high dose immune suppressants. You ever see the look on someones face that screamed "I'm a giant idiot"? This lady had that look.

After that, the only issues I had was with this bitch of a floor manager lady who hated me and said the dumbest shit. See, I hated sitting in my room and doing nothing. The TVs are from the 80s, you have to pay like 17 dollars a day for cable, and when you have fresh lungs, and the ability to do shit without all the bad stuff, you generally don't want to sit down.

So I'd always walk around the Nurses desk and chat with the nurses. I'm a very social person. I love learning more about their job and I know it helps to have a patient not be a giant pain in the ass but this floor lady told me that, and again, I shit you not.

"You can't stand around the desk all day, you'll over hear confidential information about patients, but you can sit in a chair"

Ya....those were her actual words. I remember this because when that bitch of a lady forced me back to my room I'd write everything down on my laptop. I wanted to keep track of everything that happened so I could always tell the tales correctly.

But ya, I wasn't allowed to stand as that would overhear confidential stuff where as sitting would render my ears useless and thus not overhear a damn thing.

There were some other minor incidents with that lady but they weren't anything too bad, the biggest one I can remember aside from the one I just said was when I was still barely able to walk long distances, I had asked a Nurse to come with me to the Cafe incase anything happened and to help me wheel my IV pole around. She said they were too busy to accompany me and that I would have to wait 2 hours. I said fuck that and went on my own. The walk wasn't so bad, what was bad was wheeling my heavy ass IV pole down a ramp(This was like day two on the Recovery Ward).

Having a ripped open sternum being held together by a wire and staples wasn't not the best for having upper body strength.. That was probably the second most painful thing I did after transplant. The first of course was being forced to cough when I was back in the ICU.

After about 7 days on the Recovery Ward I was ready to go home but just as they take my blood for that day they find my body isn't taking the main Oral Anti-rejection med too well and my drug levels were extremely low. If I remember right, they want the level to be, I think, 300-500, my level that day was 66. It scared the shit out of me. I thought I was going to go into rejection. So they decided to keep me a little longer to make sure my body evened out.

Instead of keeping me on the recovery ward, they sent me to the Respiratory ward cause they needed the Beds. Nothing wrong with that.

But I'll leave it here for now. Don't want to make these too long so people get bored.

Till next time my thousands of readers!