Quick! Tell me Your Tricks, Your Tips, Your Advice…

OK, so, sometime in the next, oh, 18 or 19 hours, I have a medical procedure, the likes of which has created an extremely high sense of anxiety in me.

How do you cope with extreme anxiety-producing procedures, things you cannot avoid or ignore?

It has to do with the type of wound dressing used to pack my various injury sites created when my abdomen went and tried to explode; it’s called a VAC, and medical and science geeks all around me get all excited at the mere thought. Essentially, it’s a sponge that allows the wound to treat itself from the inside out, rather than from the top down like a regular would might do. It runs through a machine that helps squeeze the sponges out several feet away, so it’s not just sitting there absorbing ick, but it’s processing the ick out of itself and returning to the wound – with audible results, sometimes, depending on the setting of the machine.

I have two VAC wound spots, plus some more traditionally packed areas, and my doctors are all aflutter about how well it’s working.  Watch for me in medical journals in another year or two, I betcha.

Great.  I’m grateful that such technology works and understand why it’s better/safer/different/better than than the traditional method.

But the process of changing the VAC dressing?

Hurts.

A lot.

I understand the theory that, right now, I’ve had three changes… the initial dressing was changed, then change #2 happened, and both of those were in the Surgical ICU: where the doctors had access to IV medications such as Versed and Fentanyl, allowing them to put me into a “conscious sedation” state: later on, I could remember pain, but I did not remember the process at all.  Just “fell asleep,” sort of, and woke up later with a very strange feeling of vivid dreams I couldn’t quite grasp.  It’s the same process I went through at the general-anesthesia dentist I used before.  Works fine for me, I’m OK with a big, heaping helping of groggy for the rest of the day as a trade-off for awareness of the event in the moment.

Then, for change #3, I was on the regular gynecological surgical floor, which means the patients spend a lot more time vertical than in the ICU, though we’re not exactly holding hopscotch tournaments in the hallways.  The rule is that the doctors on any given floor need to follow the pharmaceutical/medication rules of that floor, so if doctors would not ordinarily have that particular type of medication here, because it would take, for instance, special anesthetic residency training to be able to use those medications, then those medications are not used.

(There is a certain lapse in logic to me, something to the effect of, “You know, I’d be happy to walk back down to the SICU and lie down on a cafe table in order to get this treatment, because if it does exist somewhere in the hospital then I should be able to get it.”)  But, alas, that’s not allowed.  Trust me, if it was, I’d have found a way to reason them into it.

This means that, every three days from now until the VAC is removed – perhaps around April 9, which would mark 30 days – I get to hang around while they change the dressing  (OK, not true; they can do it from the rehab center I’ll be moving to next, as well).  The theory is that it will, early on, increase in pain, as I am more conscious and the sponges are large – but that, over time, it will get much better, because as they dig out the old dressings (not unlike scooping out a pumpkin for Halloween, and there‘s something I’ll never think quite the same about again) they get rid of old, previous scar tissue and nastiness as well, and so as time goes on not only do the sponges get smaller as the wound heals and gets smaller, but also the edges of the wounds get smoother and easier to work with.

Great.  Easier over time, less painful, quicker.  Fabulous.  But between now and then, there is tomorrow, and probably the three-days-from-tomorrow, times which I expect to be at least as miserably painful and scary and intense as two days’ ago’s event was.

Oh.
My.
God.

It hurt.  Lots.  Willem was there, initially to “hold my hand” and eventually to “hold me from leaping up to cling from the ceiling.”  They gave me extra pain medication, and they gave me Ativan, and both of those helped… some.

But I need better ideas.  Seriously good ideas.  What do you do, when you know you’re on your way into something that is going to cause intense pain and discomfort?  I’m going to try playing something on my iPod, and I’m going to have my husband right up close to help keep me grounded and focused on the fact that there is, in fact, an end in sight.  I’m planning to take a shower ahead of time.  Am open to other ideas… anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?  Anyone?

Thanks in advance…