traumatic medical stuff

Lady Lithia, I have one thing to say. Holy crap!!!

When I was pregnant with my first child I developed severe pre-eclampsia (high BP), I was induced @ 35 weeks, during my induction my placenta abrupted (started to detatch from uterus prematurely). I had to be rushed to the OR for an emergency c-section. I had an epidural but it was only working on one side. The dr started the c-section before I was put to sleep and I felt everything on the right side. I had awareness, but could not move after being put to sleep. I woke up from surgery screaming !! The person who was doing my anesthesia told my nurse that he had given me a lot of meds and that I should be comfortable, so she couldn't give me anything else. To make matters worse, I am a nurse in the unit I delivered on. After I went back to work after maternity leave, I found out that the anesthesia guy who took care of me had been fired due to falsifying records and stealing drugs from pts. I could not step foot in the OR to take care of pts without panicking. I think I had PTSD, although I was never diagnosed officially. After about 6 months, I was able to "talk" myself into taking my pts to the OR. Even today (8 years later), if I have a patient who is having pain in the OR it freaks me out a little.
When I was going to have my RNY and before my 2 EGD's with dilation, I was so scared and freaked out that I was going to have awareness, but thank God I didn't.

Anyway, I pray and use positive self talk to get through things.
Mandy

Just a little P.S. I see that many people that posted had problems with heart and OB surgeries, statistics show that these two areas of med have the most awareness under anesthesia :(

Mandy, I would have swore  it was my daughter posting, She had an identical pregnancy as you,  but did not wake upset & in pain, now is pregnant agian and very nervous, but is at a new hospital, glad thigs are improving for  you.

my second pregnancy was perfect, Congrats to her !!

I woke on the table during both my c-sections and when they took out my gall bladder in 99. Now when I need surgery I constantly tell the anesthesiologist about my past experiences.

I have been thru so much medically that despite growing up with a huge respect and a fear of doctors that now I will argue with them if I know i'm right. If they say i'm not then they have to explain it to me. I also do not let them "dumb it down" for me. I learned their jargon, despite not being a medical practitioner. If I can learn how to understand them then they can speak to me like I matter.

I think having been thru what I have has made me more outspoken and definitely less trusting of the medical field.

Talking to counselors helped me some thru the years. Talking to my family helped too. I do still have issues tho. At least I know I can force myself to do what needs to be done, and I have no hesitation to ask for something to calm me down if/when I have to have medical treatment.

 My traumatic medical experience wasn't anywhere near as horrible as some of these stories, but I do still suffer from PTSD, as a result.

I'd had a laparoscopy to remove a very large ovarian cyst, and my doctor ended up having to make an incision that was almost the size of an open incision.  Somehow, the recovery room wasn't given the information, and I was sent home right after surgery without proper wound care instructions.  Within a few days, I developed a pretty nasty infection.  I went back to the doctor and they had re-open the incision, cauterize it with silver nitrate, and pack it.  While doing so, they caught a bleeder, and caused an incredible amount of pain (no amount of local anesthetic will cure you from that amount of pain).  

I was screaming in the doctor's office, and there was so much blood...  Later, I found out that they had to move the patients from the offices near me.  For the next 3 weeks, I had to return to the office to have the packing removed, the wound slightly reopened, cauterized with silver nitrate, and repacked.  

It took me six months to recover from that relatively minor surgery.  Of particular concern was the feeling of vulnerability that happened whenever I felt my abdomen being exposed.  I would cringe and sometimes break down in tears just thinking about it.   

So, did I get over it?  I don't know.  I'm fearful about wound care.  Although I can handle just about everything myself, I really need help with cleaning and rebandaging incisions (I did it for myself for the first time today).   I try not to think about the experience too much, and when I do, I force myself to slowly tell my story (usually to myself) to avoid transference.  (When I was a young teenager, my father forced me to garden with him and during the experience, I discovered a worm.  Rather than deal with the emotional trauma associated with my father's actions, I created a worm phobia which I still have to this day).  

I don't know if this is what a psychologist would advise.  I'm quite certain that some people's trauma is so severe that slowing down and telling their story would end up overwhelming their lives.  I'm sure there is no single treatment, but that PTSD is a condition that is situationally manged.  It does seem to be what many of us are doing in this thread, though.

 when i had my rny my veins started collapsing under my ivs (i had 2). the fluids started pooling under my skin making a bubble, i called the nurse in and she kinda brushed me off and said it was fine. i was too out of it to fight about it at that point so i just said okay. by the time my sister had gotten there later in the day it had gotten worse (she was still in her clinicals at that point but she's now a respiratory therapist) and she knew it was not right. again the nurse said it was fine, but my sister was not having it. thinking about it now i was probably starting to get dehydrated and couldn't keep my eyes open at all. eventually they decided okay it was time to deal with the problem. it took 3 different nurses to get a new line started. i was easily stuck 20 times everywhere from my elbows down. the iv they eventually got was in my thumb! i've never even heard of them putting one there. and wouldn't you know, about an hour later that one collapsed too! (i've always had awful veins). after that they decided i didn't really need an iv anymore since i was cleared for liquids anyway. luckily i haven't had an iv since surgery so i don't know how i am going to react. 


my dad had a colonoscopy about a year and a half ago where they couldn't get him fully under anestheisa and he remembers a good amount of it. that scares me a lot.

Get as many details as you can about what actually happened, so you can understand it better.

  In your case, they told you why they restrained you.  I just remember being woken up from surgery by my horrible nurse who was shaking me and kept yelling at me to wake up, and then them holding my arms down (I had scratch marks all up one of my arms from this) and then some guy coming along and ripping the tube out of my throat as I struggled.  Then not being able to breathe.  I couldn't get any air in, and the nurse kept telling me "It doesn't feel like you can breathe but you can" and I just shook my head and begged her with my eyes to help me, because I thought I was going to die at that moment.  I don't remember if I breathed and then passed out, or if I passed out and then my body took over and I breathed. 

 The next thing I recall after that is waking up in horrendous pain (my labor with pitocin was a 10 on the pain scale, this pain was a 9.5) and having no way to communicate.  I couldn't speak, my voice was just about gone and my throat so dry it was hard to breathe.  I couldn't sit up.  So I put my arm in the air and waited for someone to come over.

 Little Miss Nurse Ratchett gave me some pain meds and kept telling me to push the PCA button (which wasn't touching the pain).  She gave me a wet swab for my mouth and I was then able to speak.  I told them I thought I was having a heart attack, my chest felt like it was being crushed and my back hurt so badly.  They put an ice pack on either side of me.  Then, as I laid there in pain, crying, saying "God, please help me."  Nurse Ratchett said some nasty things to me.  Stuff like "you're a grown-up, you made this choice, you can handle the pain."  She told me I was "scaring the other patients" with my crying.  

One nurse who actually had a shred of kindness told me that my pain could be from gas built up under my ribs and that walking would help.  I wanted to get up and walk immediately then.  She said I couldn't until they brought me out of recovery and upstairs.  I was stuck in recovery for over five hours.  I don't know why, but it sucked.

As soon as I got upstairs, and had a decent human being for a nurse, I started to feel better.  She took my vitals and got me walking 20 minutes after I got on the floor, and the crushing pain decreased into something tolerable.

I still need to go to the hospital and see those records from when I was in recovery.  I was waiting to "cool off" because I have been extremely pissed about the whole thing.  I want to know why I was woken up by that nurse.  I want to know what happened with the whole breathing tube thing - and should I expect that kind of hell if, in the future, I need another surgery?  God forbid I need my gallbladder out.  I'll be terrified to go under because waking up was extremely traumatic.

They did tell me why, but only after the fact.  Like, days after.  Or, if they did tell me at the time, I was too out of it to remember.  I do remember, though, that when I realized I was restrained, thinking it must be so I didn't pull out the tube.  I don't even remember why I knew this, but I was aware that they often restrain patients when they are intubated because it is uncomfortable and patients feel like they can't breathe and try to pull out the tube.  So I did understand why at the time but it was still pretty traumatic for me.  I have PTSD and being restrained is a scary thing for me.

I will say, my doctor and all the nurses were really kind to me and I think that helped a lot.  I'm not sure they realized how traumatic some stuff was for me, but they were nice.

Did you complain to the hospital about the way the nurse treated you in recovery?

I DEFINTELY agree with your assessment that people seem to expect us to just "move on" after these traumatic medical incidents.  

Some people can, of course, depending on how traumatic it was. When I had my hysterectomy, I was only 32 years old and had no children, and I was pretty upset about losing the prospect of having any (but I was out of options)  I was pretty upset the morning of surgery and as I was waking up in my hospital room, I could hear an infant -- a VERY young infant -- crying.  They had put  me in a room with a woman who had complications after having given birth just a few weeks earlier and her husband was bringing the baby in so she could continue to nurse a couple of times a day!  I was close to hysterical with grief and had a hard time even explaining to the nurse why they were going to HAVE to move one  of us to another room.  Although the memory of how painful it was when it happened is still with me, after the incident was over and I was focused on healing, the trauma of it did just sort of fade.  I did, however, tell my mom and best friend what happened as soon as they had moved me to another room.

With the nose packing issue (the broken bone in my sinus cavity still hurts when the weather fronts come through), however... because it triggered the existing PTSD... I am still working on some of the "fallout" from it with my therapist.  Even though I have only been working with her for a few months and am still reluctant to be as open with her as my old therapist, being able to talk about what happened, and what it triggered has been absolutely essential.

Lora