In June 2020, Paul Riekert had to go for emergency surgery. He lived to tell the tale.
Part 1
I feel broken. Like I’ve been in an intense fight with a super-aggressive opponent. I also feel like I am suffering from a debilitating hangover. The new 20 cm laparotomy scar on my stomach is itchy and painful at the same time. There are three steel staples still embedded in my sternum. Have you ever been bitten by a big dog – receiving a deep, effortless wound? It feels like that.
About a month ago it was twenty times worse. The wounds were fresh. I woke up in a nebulous state. It was difficult for my eyes to focus properly. I could see a row of beds in front of me, a few metres away. Next to each bed, on both sides, were arrays of machines and drips and monitor screens. It looked a bit like an ICU. Then it hit me: this IS the ICU. I am in the ICU. So I must be alive. Feeling awful, but alive. Wow!
(I tried to recall the last thing that happened: a group of masked medical people staring down at me, while I was lying on my back on a well-lit white bed. A soundbite from the scene drifted into my head:
“You have a perforated duodenum. And that’s just the start. It’s an emergency.”
“Emergency?”
“We must operate ASAP, otherwise you’ll die.”)
I felt an immense sense of relief. So all that stuff had been taken care of. I was all fixed!
It took just one tiny movement of my left leg to tell me that I was much more broken than I thought. There were pipes and cables and sensors and drip tubes connected to me. With great effort, I looked down the front of my hospital gown and saw two drainage bags dangling from holes beneath my ribs, and in the middle a serious, thick plaster from the tip of my sternum past my navel. Big wound.
Lying back triggered the pain again. It was incredibly intense. I could tell that I was on morphine – the great indifference was alive and well – but it couldn’t keep a lid on this pain completely. Ferocious. Like a family of badgers trying to claw their way out of my stomach. (Similar to the cover of The Mothers Of Invention’s ‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh‘, but from the inside.) Every tiny movement sent shockwaves from my stomach to the rest of my being. OK then. Lie still. Stay like that.
As the opiates faded a little, I felt brave enough to think about my situation. I was alive, which was great. I was in the ICU, which was alarming. Was I that broken? In need of 24-hour care? Did I really need my blood pressure checked every half an hour? And what was this going to cost me? Serious surgery. I had nothing to compare it with. It was all new, a different universe. And it was completely unexpected.
I realised with horror that I had a translucent pipe coming out of my nose. I could feel it at the back of my throat too. So that had to be going into my stomach. Yes. So it was nil per mouth for me – saline solution and intravenous food for the near future. (I heard that some of the intravenous food make you smell like a fish oil milkshake. Luckily, the stuff they gave me was neutral.)
There are no windows in that ICU. Technically there are a few windows, but they had been thoroughly censored, remaining tight-lipped about changes: darkness or light or sunlight or clouds, you would be none the wiser. There are plenty of ways and places to check the actual time, but it becomes meaningless. The lights are always on. It is always noisy and busy. Even when you’re on a continuous morphine drip, you cannot ever fall asleep completely. You can merely nod off. If you’re lucky, you can get a few hours of sleep that way. At what seems like a random time, teams of two or three nurses pull off your bedding and give you a bed-bath, no matter how you protest.
I was attached to no less than fourteen pipes, tubes and cables. I couldn’t move without triggering some alarm and reprimanding looks from personnel.
So I was stuck in an expensive place where I couldn’t sleep, where the lights were never turned off, where I couldn’t move properly, eat or drink anything, couldn’t see any visitors, and where I was in pain constantly. If there were a hell, this place was it. And I had no choice: I had a desperate need to be there.