Update
(Page 5)
The Recovery
For the next five days I would be prodded, poked, and tested, but most importantly tended to and cared for by a truly amazing group of staff who not only took their job seriously, but made sure everyone’s needs were met. Every single one of them was informative, attentive, and genuinely concerned about every patient’s health, making my stay at RCH as pleasant as could be.
If there was one area of improvement, though, it would be the pain medication protocols during those critical first few days after surgery. As I eventually learned, Hydromorphone comes in two forms: liquid and pill. As a liquid, it is injected into an IV and within minutes, the magic of drugs prevails. It’s quick, but in liquid form it doesn’t last as long as the pill.
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The downside of the pill is that it takes much longer to absorb into your system before you feel the effects (from what I recall, anywhere between ½ to 1 hour). In the ICU it was mostly Hydromorphone injections, but when I was moved to the South wing, the transition to pills began almost immediately, and that is when the roller-coaster of feeling good/not-so-good began.
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Mother-nature was working overtime to heal things inside, but make no mistake, we who had our chest split open and sown back together are in extreme pain. I completely understand the protocol to wean the patient off of Hydromorphone and onto Extra Strength Tylenol, but perhaps not so fast. No one is going to get addicted in the first few days after surgery. Instead, keeping them comfortable with regular doses to prevent the pain peaks-and-valleys would go a long way toward everyone’s happiness. Knowing the activation time, absorption rates, and the length of effectiveness of the pill, why not give everyone a continuous supply so there is no lapses in-between?
Asking me “What my pain level was between 1 and 10?” seemed pointless, as I had no way to quantitatively convey my aches to someone who had no point of reference for what I was feeling.
A better solution would have been to simply dispense the Hydromorphone on a timely basis and save everyone much aggravation — less work for the nurses because we wouldn’t repeatedly click ‘the button’ to get more medication, and the patients wouldn’t feel like pests because they had to constantly ask for pain killers. A win-win situation for all, and perhaps some food-for-thought for any nurses, nurse practitioners, and/or doctors reading this...
