Recapping continues: ICU happenings

I lived in the ICU for three days. If you read Kelsey's post from Jan. 17, you know some of what happened in there.

One more angel
Each day I would have two nurses to take care of me - one during the day and one at night. These nurses were wonderful. One specifically, Nurse Tricia, was so good to me. She was a soft-spoken lady and very pretty. When I would complain about the pain and ask (beg) for help, I felt like she really wanted me to feel better. She was genuinely concerned. One time, the pain was so bad, but she couldn't give me anything; and I was soooo thirsty, but I couldn't have anything to drink either. She found these little spongy stick things, soaked them in water and gave to me to suck on. It wasn't much, but it helped.

This is how much this nurse went above and beyond- on the morning of my third day in ICU, she offered to give me a sponge bath to make me feel more comfortable. She recruited another nurse, and together they cleaned me up. All I had to do was lay there. This was the best part of my entire stay. I felt at least a little bit less sickly.

It is soooo important to have a good nurse. With one exception, which I'll get to in a future post, all of my nurses at Baylor were phenomenal. They made me feel like I was their top priority and like they really wanted to help me feel better. If I needed something, they tried their best to get it. Sometimes that just involved listening to me and consoling me when I was crying and upset, and they did so, no questions asked. These moments cannot be undervalued. Thank you to all my nurse/angels!!

Please, leave me alone
Every day, a slew of technicians, nurses, specialists, doctors, blah, blah, blah, would come to my room to pick at me, move me and make me do an array of things I just did not want to do.

The worst of the bunch were the x-ray techs. Each day, very early in the morning (maybe so visitors wouldn't hear me yell at them?) two of them would come in with a portable x-ray machine. One would stand on each side of my bed. They'd then countdown and lift me up and over using the sheet underneath me while one put a large, hard film case (sorry, I don't know the technical terms) where my back would be. Then they'd roll me back onto it. "OUCH! Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod hurry!"

They'd take a picture, then lift me again and remove it. I'm sure they're very nice people in real life, but I hated them. Before I realized my dislike, I remember apologizing to one of them for my rank breath. I hadn't brushed my teeth in days and could feel the stench in my mouth. He said it was ok and not to worry. I never apologized for it again.

Just breathe
Another frequent visitor to my room was the respiratory therapist. (Thank you, Kristen, for the explanation of what follows) After surgery, you tend to lay around and not move much, so you begin taking slower, shallower breaths. If you aren't fully expanding your lungs, the tiny air sacs at the base of your lungs could collapse, leading to pneumonia. This is called atelectasis. To combat this, a respiratory therapist would come to my room multiple times throughout the day to do breathing exercises with me.

One of my frequent tests involved using an incentive spirometer. The picture on the left is the same one that I have. Every couple of hours, I would need to breathe on the tube, trying to make the yellow piece on the far left and the white piece in the middle raise up and stay up as long as I could on an inhale. I believe they would want me to do 30 inhales. When I left the hospital, they gave the incentive spirometer to me to use at home.
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Additionally, I would have to do another respiratory test each time with a device that I can't remember what it was called. It had a long clear, plastic balloon on one end. The tech would put some kind of chemical in it, and I would have to breath in and out until the balloon filled all the way up. Then, he or she would remove the balloon and tell me to keep breathing. These exercises were surprisingly hard to do. Now when I blow on my spirometer, I can easily get it to the top. Then, I could barely do it. It was also very easy for me to lose count when trying to get my 30 breaths in or almost fall asleep or get light-headed, another thing I will attribute to all the drugs.
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Then there were the physical and occupational therapists. Oh man. In the spirit of keeping this post from turning into a small novel, I'll blog on them later. Stay tuned!