After my bowel resection I found recovery very slow. Yes, I was in a lot of pain, but pain, I am used to. I walked slowly, and it was a real effort to hoist myself out of the bed and sit up for any length of time, or simply go to the toilet to pass water. All this I could cope with. The thing I really struggled with was the nausea. I stopped taking the morphine related painkillers, because I kept being sick, but my surgeon insisted I continue to take something other than paracetamol. She prescribed me paracetamol, and tramadol at alternate intervals, combined with three different antisymetics so that I could have something to reduce the nausea every four hours. On paper this was a perfect solution. In practice, where you can not access your own medicine, but have to wait for a nurse to bring it to you, this was not so perfect. I did not like the way tramadol sent you into a hallucinatory sleep, so I tried my hardest to do without that anyway.
The real problem though, was that the ward was quite simply understaffed, so getting antisymetics every four hours was impossible. If I kept an eye on the time myself, and called for somebody, to get my next dose, by the time I actually got what I asked for, I was already feeling sick again. Couple this with breakfast lunch and dinner being very efficient, it was a recipe for disaster. You could pretty much guarantee that half an hour before a meal was due to arrive, I would be feeling like I might manage to eat something. Then I would begin to feel tired and nautious. I would try to get hold of an antisymetic, but it wouldn't materialize. Then a meal would turn up and I wouldn't be able to eat it. Then the porters would come and clear it away and note down I still hadn't eaten anything. Then, of course, a nurse would turn up with the antisymetic I'd asked for an hour ago!
This went on four days. We were also in the middle of a heat wave. By God it was hot. When asked by the surgeons how I was doing I lied through my teeth. I wanted to get home, they wanted the bed free, nobody wanted an excuse for me to stay any longer!
When I finally made it home, five days after my operation, several family members wondered whether I should have been discharged. It quickly proved to be the correct course of action, as in no time, the nausea cleared, my appetite returned and I made very rapid progress indeed.
A few months later, my mum's dog swallowed a marble, and got it stuck in her bowel. She had to have it cut out, and basically had a small bowel resection. My mum asked the vet whether she should be feeding her , or letting the gut rest immediately after the operation. He replied that after an operation such as this, the gut needed nutrition in order to recover. For this reason, the dog was tho be fed as normal. When my mum related this story to me she simply said at the end. "It's no wonder you didn't start to recover from your opp until you came home!"
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