Visiting a post-operative maaseru...

[fajrdrako]

Gord was able to drive me to the hospital after work, thank goodness - I don't know how I'd have got there otherwise. I had custody of maaseru's bag of stuff that she needed for a few days in the hospital, and of course I just wanted to visit and see her. She had surgery on one of her bad knees.

The hospital information desk no longer has people at it; just a telephone. Maybe it's staffed at some times of the day - there was a chair. It took the voice on the phone a while to track maaseru to the Recovery Unit, since she didn't have a room yet; it wasn't visiting hours, but they said I could go in and leave the bag. Take the elevator to the third floor, and follow the green dots.

I went to the third floor. I found the green dots, which went past the elevator in both directions. I picked a direction at random - inevitably, the wrong one - and found myself in a ward of gowned and bandaged people. A kind nurse looked up where maaseru was, and actually took me there - quite a long hike in the opposite direction. The third floor is very quiet, all operating rooms and post-op patients sleeping on gurneys. No visitors, no bustle.

Though two different sources had told me maaseru was in the Recovery Unit, there is no room labelled "Recovery Unit" - instead it's the PACU for Post-Anaesthetic Care Unit. You have to call them from a phone outside the door to be admitted.

maaseru was asleep when I arrived, but she must have heard me explain to the nurse that I'd come to bring her bags, because she pried an eye partly open and said hello. I explained that I'd brought the bag and they weren't letting me stay but I'd come back after six, when visitors were allowed, or at least briefly tolerated. I asked how she felt. "Sleepy," she murmured, and fell asleep again.

I went to the cafeteria and had tepid liver with onions and vegetables for supper - actually rather good, considering hospital cafeterias. Orange jello for dessert, just because it seemed so suitable to eat jello in a hospital. The alternative dessert, chocolate cake with sprinkles, looked dessicated and vaguely dangerous. The cafeteria was huge and largely empty.

After six, I returned to the PACU and they said I could visit "but only for a few minutes". So I took up space at the side of maaseru's bed, leaning on her guardrail, and stayed for about ninety minutes - more than a few by my definition, but I guess I was non-disruptive and it was clear maaseru liked having me there.

She was eating supper when I arrived, and making a good meal of it, considering the circumstances - between her drugged sleepiness and all those tubes, including oxygen in her nose. She wasn't very mobile, but was handling her soup spoon deftly in a sort of careful slow motion. She was barely awake most of the time, and kept falling asleep between sentences, sometimes in the middle of sentences, once even in the middle of a word. It made for nice low-key, undemanding conversation. She kept apologizing for being boring - which would be absurd even if she was. If anyone was boring, it was me. She confided that her knee didn't feel much different, but given all the circumstances, it's a wonder she could feel her body at all.

I was able to hold her cup for sips of apple juice, and tea. The only near-mishap was when she picked up her cup of tea to take a sip and fell asleep simultaneously - I had to grab the cup before it dropped. "Oops," she said, waking up a little.

At almost eight o'clock, they asked me to leave.

I walked home. The Civic Hospital is only a few miles from my place, and I've been feeling desperate for exercise, slightly stir crazy from not getting out about, and it was a good evening for walking. It has been snowing for the better part of two days, but the sidewalks had mostly been ploughed on those streets, so the walking wasn't bad. Now my legs are tired, but it was satisfying. Fresh air - what a concept.

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[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yes, really, it was.