In Celebration of getting my first ever "follower" on this blog, I thought I'd continue with the story of my accident.
As we all know, in 2008 I blew myself up while burning leaves. I was using gas (dumb move, yet exciting), which subsequently exploded and left me with first, second and third degree burns on my stomach, chest, arms, wrist and face.
At my last writing I was out of the operation having skin grafts on my stomach, chest, wrist and arms. I experience PTSD for the first time the day after surgery. Now, just four days after I arrived at the Westchester Burn Unit in NY, I settled in for six more hospital days.
My time here was marked by the changing shifts of hospital staff, meal deliveries, and medication servings. My ten unique observations (as recorded on napkins) during this period of time are as follows:
1. The people who deliver hospital meals eventually take on the uniformity of the meals they serve.
2. In general, the overnight nurses are not as qualified as the daytime nurses.
3. The pain medication made me constipated, and the anti-constipation medication did nothing. Although I kept telling the doctors and nurses that the AC meds weren't working, they continued to give me the same stuff until I was finally suffering severe abominal pain. Now we had three medical issues to deal with: Burns, PTSD, and severe constipation.
4. There are basically two types of people who work in a hospital: caretakers and punishers.
5. After you've had a skin graft, aside from the pain, the most annoying things are trying to control body temperature, finding ways to reposition your body, and getting at itchy places.
6. Whenever a swath of your body is in bandages, you MUST have a thin, long, tool with which to insert underneath the bandages to get at hard to scratch places! Luckily, during a prior Christmas, my mother had given me a thin backscratcher as a present. It was one of those long, thin, sticks with a little hand at the end and now I had a use for it.
7. For some still unkown and very odd reason, the hospital had no dental floss.
8. If you try to do something by yourself the nurses can become very concerned. But if you ask them to help you with something, the nurses can appear very disinterested.
9. I was the least burned victim on the unit and the only burn victim that was in my age range. Everyone else was either very young or very old.
10. Ten days is about the longest I could imagine staying in the hospital. Luckily, I was able to leave at that time. For those who must endure more time than this, I salute you.
