That was the overriding theme of my surgical experience since that is the phrase that Mike — the Unknown Brother-in-Law — kept repeating mantra-like throughout the process as we wended our way as a family from pre-op to post/op to post/op surgical calamity to watching the doctors and hospital staff scurry for the fucking corners like cockroaches in a kitchen that the light has just come on in and exposed their dirty cockroach ways..

I think Mike was saying it as much for his own peace of mind as he was for mine.  In fact, I know he was because the way I am psychologically constituted, whenever I hear someone say “it’s all good”  I tend to immediately think to myself, “What?  Is he nuts?  Its all fucking bad doesn’t he see that?”  And Mike knows that my mind goes in that direction.

But that’s just me.  I tend to be a dark clouds kinda guy without the lovely silver lining.  Generally because there isn’t one.

A silver lining that is.  There are always dark clouds galore.

In this case, the case of my most recent surgery, the dark clouds looming were simply the abject and disgraceful condition of American health care in the 21st century.  You see, in today’s health care racket the racketeers spend all of their time and effort on doing the things that get you to the point where they can put their hands in your pocket and take your wallet but, having accomplished that, their main mission in life, they don’t do any of the thing necessary to, well. . .  to keep you alive after they’ve fleeced you.

They parade battalions of nurses by you all asking the exact same questions and taking the exact same information from you — this in an effort to forestall the almost guaranteed lawsuit that will inevitably result from their disgraceful malfeasance — and they trot out the surface things designed to make the patient feel as if he’s being listened to and cared for — the lounge chairs that recline into beds as you await your surgery and the hospital staff that comes by and asks you if you need anything, anything at all. But when you say yes, that you do in fact need something from them, they get that vague and glassy expression on their face that tells you they’re not listening and they sort of wander off mouthing that they’ll “get right on that” never to return.

And then there’s the doctors.  Don’t EVEN get me started on them because in my opinion the doctors in America don’t get nearly the blame that they deserve for the disgraceful level of health care that we are subjected to in this country. We tend to see doctors as people embarked upon some great and pragmatic mission to save people.  But what most of them are are money grubbing hoors who are just looking for the next easy paycheck and Caribbean golf outing paid off by some pharmaceutical giant.

We blame Big Pharma and Big Insurance for all of our medical ills and tend to let the guys who do the cutting off with nary a nod in the direction of their abject blame.

And granted those douche bags from the insurance and pharmaceutical industry deserve every bit of our opprobrium and condemnation but these doctors these. . . these . . . PEOPLE.  They are fully culpable for the disaster that we have to live with every time we go to get treated at a hospital, clinic or doctors office.

They are arrogant and lazy and  greedy and not nearly as smart as they would like us all to believe and if you buy into their bullshit and cede control of your life to them just because they  wear a white lab coat and managed to get a degree in medicine from some third rate fucking land grant college somewhere in some flyover state then you are clearly insane.

As my Step-Father used to joke as he was subjected to years of cancer treatment before dying, “What do you call person who graduates last in his class from medical school?”

“Doctor.”

Things started out well enough.  When I arrived at Swedish Hospital in Seattle for my partial/total thyroidectomy the staff was courteous and seemed highly competent.  I was having my own doctor perform the actual surgery but Swedish was providing the OR, nursing staff and anesthesiologist.

Thumbs up for the footies they gave me prior to surgery.

My surgeon, Dr. C told me to make sure that I told the anesthesiologist that I had trouble with anesthesia — with a history of not just waking up {twice} on an operating table but with post operative pain control.

Three times in the past doctors in either an OR or an ER have struggled to control my pain and it was only after what many of them considered to be dangerous levels of narcotics being administered to me was my pain able to be managed at an acceptable level.

In a nutshell, narcotics don’t work on me.

At all.

Taking a nap before they cut on me.

The anesthesiologist Dr. Ying — whom I feel free to name here since I’ll be naming him in a lawsuit in fairly short order — was duly informed by both me and Mike — the Unknown Brother-in-Law — about the dangers of not making sure that a “loading dose” of pain meds is administered prior to my coming out from under the general anesthesia.  Mike knew this from experience having witnessed the lack of effect of pain meds had on me when my appendix ruptured.

Dr. Ying nodded his head sagely, said not to worry I wouldn’t feel a  thing and wandered off to count the money he would make from this operation that goes toward his salary of $314,000+ per year.

The hot male medical student with the phlebotomist teaching him how to stick needles in people and using my arm as the pin cushion.

The hot medical student and I compare veins pre-surgery.

Thumbs up for my fetching surgical cap.

Apparently the operation itself went well, although I cannot personally attest to that since I was unconscious.  It was post op that things started to go badly south because when I came to I was in absolute agony.  The pain from just having my neck ripped open and part of my thyroid removed was absolutely horrific and of course Dr. Ying had done nothing to insure that I was medicated properly.

And he was gone.

I mean where else would he be?  His part in the operation was over — the part where he gets paid — so he just up and fucking left with me in recovery screaming in agony and nobody able to get a sense of what kind of drugs to administer in order to relieve my pain.

Eventually another Swedish Hospital pain guy was brought in and more than a half dozen syringes of Fentanyl and Morphine were administered over the next hour plus.

All to no effect.

And while this was going on I had nurses AND a doctor holding me down to the bed, with a doctor across my legs, in an effort to control my writhing while my blood pressure was spiking at well over 220.  And it was this spiking blood pressure, combined with my writhing. that unbeknownst to all of us, combined to form a hematoma in my throat where the surgery had just been performed that sat there for the next hour like a time bomb waiting to fucking explode.

Eventually, after more than an hour, the pain was brought under control and I was readied to be transported from recovery to critical care.  My orderly, R.J. and I were joking around about what I had just gone through as he wheeled me to the elevator and as we boarded the cab for the ride to critical care the elevator doors closed and my neck fucking exploded.

My face, neck and part of my head swelled up in literally two seconds to more than twice their normal size.  The look on R. J.’s face said it all for his eyes bulged out — probably almost as far as mine — and his mouth fell open as I stopped breathing.

To his credit when we hit the critical care floor he had me racing toward help like an Olympic sprinter and when we hit the critical care ward itself fucking pandemonium ensued.

Nurses were screaming for crash carts and my surgeon, Dr. C. — who had been alerted to the emergency by R.J.  while we were still on the elevator, rushed into the room and took one look at me and yelled that I was bleeding out and to glove and gown him immediately.

This is what the scene was like when my head exploded.

Now this is when things turned into a Chinese fire drill because as I’m lying there choking to death the entire medical arm of Swedish Hospitals vaunted critical care department DID NOT swing effortlessly and professionally into operation.  Oh no!  What happened was that it crashed and fucking burned right there with me bleeding out, choking to death AND WATCHING.

Nurses ran for cover, Dr. C stood there screaming for gloves with his arms held up as if he were praying and doctors came, went and came again all at a dead run and all doing nothing.

At this point Mike, my Brother-in-Law was brought in from the waiting room and seeing what was occurring, and seeing Dr. C standing in the middle of the room with his arms held out like Christ waiting for a pair of gloves, Mike yelled, “would someone please get him some gloves!”

Gloves were eventually produced and Dr. C demanded to know where the anesthesiologist was because he had to open me up again and open me up quickly — and of course, Dr. Ying the anesthesiologist was long gone having collected his paycheck for this unfolding horror show of his own making.

On top of all this Swedish Hospital couldn’t provide us with an emergency operating room so Dr. C jumped up on my hospital bed, which was basically sitting catty corner half in a room and half in the critical care ward hallway, and looked me in the eyes and said, “I need to open your throat right now before you die and I have to do it without anesthesia.”

And all I could do was nod my head because what?  I was gonna say “wait for the drugs” or “can we talk about this?”  Because I was quite literally dying right there in that hallway.

So he cut my throat open right there in the hallway of the critical care unit and let me tell you, having that pressure relieved and allowing that blood from the burst hematoma to pour out of me was one of the greatest feelings in the world.

A self-pic that I snapped almost immediately after the second surgery to save my life. Thumbs up for being alive!

I could breath again and, more importantly, I could watch and enjoy the fucking chaos that I was at the center of because let me tell you, chaos was ensuing at a level that I would have never in my wildest dreams thought possible for a hospital that actually does hospital stuff — like operations and such.

People were running around yelling at each other and shit was falling over and several doctors whom I didn’t know and had never seen before were yelling about getting an operating room STAT and Dr. C was screaming that he needed to transport me ASAP and this while I was still actively bleeding out.

And it was during a bit of a lull in this complete and utter pandemonium that I looked across the room at Mike my Brother-in-Law and announced at the top of my lungs so that everybody in the room basically stopped in their tracks,

“In the Marine Corps we called this kind of thing a Clusterfuck.”

Which got everyone laughing — nervously — after they all looked at each other with a silent acknowledgment that the patient was right.  It was indeed a clusterfuck of the highest order.

Eventually word came that an OR was going to be available in three minutes and I was readied for transport.  While this was happening two doctors arrived on the scene whom I had no idea who they were but one of them was carrying a fishing tackle box and he would play an important part in my life in about four minutes.

The other guy was some random sawbones named Solomon who found himself standing next to me screaming orders at everyone and basically doing nothing.

At one point a nurse, trying to stanch the flow of blood from my neck, knocked the oxygen cannula from my nose and when that happened I grabbed it and started fitting it back into place.

From right next to me Dr. Solomon leaned over to me and barked, “Patients should keep their hands off the medical equipment.”

To which I barked back even louder,

“Doctors should pay fucking better attention to detail and if they did they would see that the patient was simply replacing the cannula that had been knocked out by the nurse. And mind you own business while you’re at it asshole.”

Clearly Dr. Solomon wasn’t used to being talked to by patients like that — especially ones with their throats cut open and bleeding — and after doing an imitation of a fish opening and closing its mouth a couple times he snapped his yap shut and stalked off to annoy someone other than the paying customer.

To this day I still don’t know who the fuck he was or why he was there.

By now they had the OR ready and were wheeling me out of the critical care hallway where all the drama had occurred and as I rolled past my Brother-in-Law I gave him a big thumbs up and yelled “Hey” at him just to let him know I was still kicking in spite of the Dark Ages medicine he had just witnessed being practiced.

When I got to the operating room Dr. C was all set and ready to remove the hematoma that had formed and burst and told me he was going back into me and would fix things up and cauterize any bleeding areas.

He then introduced me to the guy with the fishing tackle box who, it turned out, was the on-call pain doc and in his tackle box was every pain medication one could possibly imagine.

He leaned over my bed and asked how I was doing.  I said “fine, all things considered” and he then asked me if I were in a lot of pain.

“Duh” I said to which he responded, “Have you ever heard of Ketamine?  That’s what I’m going to use on you to put you out.”

To which I responded in my queeniest voice,

“Oh My God!  I LOVE Special K!”

He smiled the smile of the professional doctor confident in his ability to handle the business at hand and in about three seconds the wonderful effects of a huge assed syringe full of Ketamine and the beginnings of the deepest disco K Hole I’ve ever had the pleasure of being in washed over me and I was out fucking cold.

In the end it was, in fact “all good” or so far at least.  For I haven’t developed any further hematomas — although I have been stridently warned by Dr. C not to cough, hiccup, sneeze or even breath real hard for at least several days lest a fresh hematoma develop and kill me.

Dr. C told Mike that in his entire twenty years as a surgeon he had A} never seen a human body absorb so much pain medication without it having any effect and B} never in his twenty years seen a hematoma develop in just a matter of literally seconds that caused a bleed out the way mine did.

I feel so special!

And now I’m blogging again so that’s a good sign of recovery, right?

And of course I’m looking for a good personal injury lawyer because I fully intend to make a dent in that $314,000 annual income of Dr. Yings as well as the annual P and L statement of Swedish Hospital.

Thumbs up for the morphine on demand button post surgery.

Thumbs up for the post surgery pee bottle.

Thumbs up for leaving the hospital on my own two feet and still being alive in spite of the best efforts of Swedish Hospital to kill me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 9:23 am and is filed under My Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.