The Morning After

I have a dull headache. My mouth is dry. My neck is still heavily bandaged and quite sore. But otherwise I am just fine.

I had forgotten how hard it is to sleep in a hospital. It seems like someone is always coming around to draw blood or take my vital signs or change my IV bag.

I finally convinced them that I didn’t need the heavy-duty pain medicine – that regular liquid Tylenol (the red stuff that kids take) was all I needed for pain. This was after another round of serious nausea yesterday. My system just doesn’t agree with those -ine drugs (morphine, codeine).

I am really starving this morning. The first food I had yesterday was an overcooked dinner at 7 PM. By the time I realized that I couldn’t eat the chicken, it was too late to get anything else from the kitchen.

My nurses are all foreigners by birth. The day nurse is called Hyacinth. Daniel from Ghana is my night nurse. They are very responsive when I call. But there is a lot of bureaucracy in their job and they must check with someone for any slight change in my care.

I miss my e-mail connection to my friends and I miss reading BLOGs. I was able to talk to Deborah, Reya, Mollie, and Rosa yesterday by phone just to assure them that I was OK after the surgery.

I am very ready to go home. They say I will be released around 10 AM. It’s Thanksgiving and I need to go home and get ready to eat turkey.