Heart Sick (12)

Day #6-8, Aug 4-6, 2006


The next morning I started coughing. I’ve heard about coughing after bypass surgery, and the nurses would ask the patients to cough out the phlegm. But coughing is a painful affair; especially when it was not a ‘controlled’ one.

It started in the morning with the stitches on my chest felt tight and a little painful with every cough once awhile. Then by the afternoon the frequency increased and so was the pain; coughing while lying on the bed is bad enough, coupled with pain from the wound and the fear of ‘bursting’ the stitches didn’t help. I held on dearly a pillow on my chest given to me by a nurse, enduring the pain and fearing to see blood on the pillow with every cough.

2, 668 coughs and 2 days later, I was finally out of ICU, and moved to the HDU (High Dependency Unit); it’s like a ‘semi-ICU’ with lesser patients and a window (finally!), and I had a few tubes removed as well. But my joy was short-lived as my coughing got worst it’s almost unbearable, and my surgeon decided to “put a tube into the lung to release some trapped air”, after looking at an x-ray taken earlier.

“It’s only as painful as ant’s bite”, so he said. I’m telling you NOT to believe doctors when they describe stuff like this, because it was bloody f*#%$@^ PAINFUL! Imagine pocking a tube from the back of your waist into the lung, minus anesthesia (he said “too much morphine in the body is no good”). However, I felt much better after I woke up with an extra tube attached on my body. And Peggy told me she didn’t know I could curse “so fluently”! Wonder what did I say?



-hs