Desperation Causes Good People To Make Bad Decisions
Desperation Causes Good People To Make Bad Decisions
Chapter 12 of My Story
Despite the first hip surgery being a complete disaster, the pain in my right hip was increasing, I was falling a lot, and I was tired of it all. I was tired of the embarrassment of falling and of people laughing at me for falling, but most of all, I was tired of the pain.
We went back to see Dr. Kim because he was the only surgeon willing to operate, and he was eager to get a chance to perform a successful surgery.
He scheduled surgery for the summer after Grade eleven. This time, he explained I would be in traction for six weeks, and rather than get me up and moving right away, we would take my rehabilitation slower. The extra time in traction, he reassured my parents, would ensure that the bones had sufficient time to heal, and he would remove the pins before they had time to snap.
I was admitted to the Pasqua Hospital in July 1982. In those days, all the pre-op work – blood tests, chest x-rays, etc. - was done in the hospital the day before surgery. Because there wasn't a room available in orthopedics on the 3rd floor, I was put into a semi-private room on the 1st floor. Hospital booking expected someone would be released on the 3rd floor the following day, opening a room for me in orthopedics.
At first, it seemed as though this room would be better. It was close to the front doors, and the TV room, where I could smoke, was on the corner near the stairway that led to the parking lot. I was also closer to the basement, where the little convenience store was. On the downside, I was also closer to the ER department.
My roommate was very old and very ill. It didn't take a medical degree to see that she didn't have too much time left before she would pass on, and I wasn't keen about being in a room where someone was going to die. Between worrying about my roommate dying and the upcoming surgery, I spent a lot of time chain-smoking and watching TV in the sitting room on the corner. I knew the routine. I had to have a bath before bed and scrub with the disinfectant, but I wanted to be as tired as possible, so I could fall asleep as soon as I went to bed.
Late that evening, I went to the TV room for my last cigarette of the night. Not too long after, a tall, skinny native man stumbled up the stairs and sat down across from me in the chair beside the floor ashtray. I could see that he was bleeding. He had a large gash – at least six inches long - on his chest. Obviously, he had been in a fight, and someone cut him. He started digging through the ashtray, looking for a butt to smoke. When he didn't find one, he asked me if I could give him one, but I had left my pack in my room. I didn't know what to do. There aren't nearly as many nurses on the late shift, so finding one in a hurry takes some time.
I watched him sway in his chair. Clearly, he was quite intoxicated and bleeding pretty good from the wound on his chest. Finally, I gathered the courage to speak. "Don’t you think you should go to ER?” I asked him, “you’re bleeding pretty heavy there. Someone needs to look at that gash.”
“Isn’t this the emergency?” he asked.
“No!” I said, “it’s down the stairs and down that long hallway.”
“Oh,” he said, and then he got up and stumbled down the stairs toward the ER.
I sat there for a few more minutes, wondering how many people stagger in here bleeding like that before looking for my nurse. I told her I had bathed and about the man who was bleeding. She said that happened all the time because the bar was just down the street. She gave me a sleeping pill, and I went to my room. I lay in bed, listening to the woman in the other bed struggling to breathe. I really hoped she didn’t die during the night. Eventually, I fell asleep.
The following morning, the nurse came in to start the IV and give me a dose of Valium. The nurses on this floor were very different, and I felt like I was a problem. I wanted to go up to the 3rd floor, where everyone had been kind, so I asked if I would go to orthopedics after the surgery. “Not as far as I know,” the nurse replied, “but you never know. A space could open up by the time you’re out of surgery. If it does, someone will bring all your stuff to the room.”
Not too long after, Roger came to take me to the OR. I was so happy to see a familiar face! I talked his ear off all the way to the OR theatre on the 2nd floor. When we stopped at the unit desk, the nurse gave me a blue ‘party hat’ to put on. “Make sure you tuck all your hair inside,” she said as Roger began wheeling me into the correct operating theatre.
As soon as the doors opened, I felt the familiar cold air of the operating room. Everyone was busy getting ready for the surgery. Roger wheeled me beside the operating table and asked if I could slide over or if I needed them to lift me onto the table.
“No! I can do it!” I said, and I sat up to slide myself over. As soon as I got onto the table, the nurse at the head untied my hospital gown. “Keep yourself covered as you lay down,” she said.
Immediately, another nurse came over with a heated flannel sheet and laid it over me. Together, they began attaching the EKG leads and strapping my arms onto the boards extending 90 degrees outward from the table. The anesthesiologist entered the OR through the doors behind me. I heard him mulling around behind me, getting the drugs ready to administer. Not too long after, he said, “you can start counting backward from 10 now.” I was asleep before I got to six.
When I came to, I was in a new room on the 3rd floor. Something wasn’t right. My mom was sitting beside the bed on a chair, and I could hear my dad yelling at someone. I must have been given some heavy doses of pain meds because I was having trouble staying awake. Two maintenance men stood at the end of my bed, holding large blocks. They were attempting to put them under the foot of the bed, but my dad was freaking out! I didn’t have blocks under the bed last time, so what was happening? Why was I in so much pain? My dad wasn’t going to leave or stop yelling until someone gave him answers. He insisted that Mary, the head nurse, contact Dr. Kim and have him come to the room to check on me.
At some point, Dr. Kim came into the room, rearranged the angles of the ropes, and adjusted the pulleys and weights for the traction. According to my mom, I had been crying non-stop before that, so they knew something was wrong. I stopped crying as soon as the traction was adjusted. Dr. Kim explained why he wanted the end of the bed lifted, so under the careful watch of my dad, the maintenance guys placed the blocks under the foot of my bed.
Two years prior, when my left hip was done, my mom didn’t sit with me at all. She went to work at the store every day with my dad. When I woke up the following day, my mom was there again, which was unexpected. I didn’t realize it at the time, but there were several reasons I resented her for that.
I asked her what was going on and why she wasn’t at work. She explained what had taken place the day before following surgery and told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to bring the head of the bed up for the next several days. She also explained that I had been crying quite a bit after surgery, so they knew I was experiencing a great deal of pain. Mom and dad decided that mom would stay at the hospital with me to watch over me and help me eat and that she wouldn’t be going to work for a little while. Mom had gone down to part-time anyway, so it wasn’t a problem this time.
Mom did her best to take care of me those first couple of days, but I didn’t understand why this was the time she decided to sit with me. At 15 years old, being fed like a baby wasn’t cool. I was embarrassed, and I was angry. I didn’t get any help before. I argued with my mom and told her I could feed myself.
I was frustrated and uncooperative, and this hurt my mom’s feelings. She didn’t understand why I was behaving the way I was, and when she told my dad later that night, he decided I was ungrateful and needed to be punished for my insolence. He refused to bring her up to the hospital for several days. He called the unit desk to let them know mom wouldn’t be up for a few days. Ironically, I was being punished for being exactly the person they created when they left me to figure everything out on my own during the first two surgeries.
The following morning, Mary came to see me. She asked how I was doing and told me that my mom wouldn’t be up to see me for a few days. She told me that my dad was punishing me for my bad behavior. I shook my head and said, “that figures.”
I managed to feed myself for the next few days. By the time mom came up again to see me, I was sitting at 45 degrees. She asked how everything was going and if I needed anything. You could smoke in your room in those days, so I asked her to get me cigarettes. We both knew dad would lose his mind if he knew she was bringing me cigarettes, but she did anyway. Mom felt bad that dad wouldn’t let her come to see me, and we talked about what had happened. I told her I had been expected to do everything for myself for every other surgery and that she was never there before. Why was this one different?
My mom was a lot more forgiving than my dad. She said she understood how I felt and that we should put it all behind us.
Hospital life is usually pretty boring, but for whatever reason, this stay was filled with all kinds of drama. The provincial health board had decided to assign surgeons with specific hospital privileges, and Dr. Kim had been appointed to a different hospital. One of the nurses came into the room in the morning and informed me that an ambulance would be moving me to the General Hospital.
“I’m not going anywhere!” I stated with as much confidence as I could muster. I explained that the nurses over there were not nearly as good as here, and I was staying right where I was. There was no way I was going in an ambulance across town on these horrible bumpy streets with a broken hip. I flat-out refused.
No one knew that Dusty had been in that hospital for months when he tried to commit suicide, which contributed to my perception of the care at the General Hospital.
Not too long after, Dr. Cawsey showed up on his usual rounds, and I told him they wanted to move me to the General. He asked me if I wanted to go, and I said, “No way!” I told him I wanted to stay exactly where I was, so he told me to stand my ground. He explained that I had rights and that they couldn’t move me if I refused to be moved. He went to the nurse’s station and called my dad.
The next thing I knew, the hospital administrator was in my room asking me why I didn’t want to go. I calmly told him that my brother had spent several weeks in the General Hospital and that the nursing staff there wasn’t anywhere near as good as here. I insisted that I wasn’t going, and most importantly, I explained there was no way that anyone was unhooking me from this traction and moving me across this city’s bumpy roads in an ambulance. The administrator said that Dr. Kim didn’t have privileges at this hospital anymore and wouldn’t be allowed to visit, and I responded by saying, “what difference does that make? He hardly visits anyway!” The entire nursing staff could not believe their ears. This 15-year-old kid was taking on the administration all by herself!
After an hour of haggling and debating, they finally agreed that I could stay. Most of the nursing staff took it as a huge compliment, and if Dr. Kim wanted to see how I was doing, he could choose to come to this hospital like any other visitor.
The whole thing was over when my parents stopped by on their way to work. When they stopped at the desk to inquire about the transfer, Mary told them I stood up to the hospital administrator by myself and assured them I wouldn’t be going anywhere.
I shared my room with three other patients. My roommates changed regularly because the typical stay for a routine hip or knee replacement was only three or four days unless there were complications.
For a couple of weeks, the bed beside me was occupied by an elderly woman from a nursing home who had fallen out of her bed and broken her hip. Her name was Lily. She had a thick European accent, long gray hair, and she was feisty! Sadly, Lily had dementia. Every night when I tried to turn the light above my bed off, she would start screaming. “They’re hiding in the bushes!” she sometimes yelled, or “Turn the lights on!” I guessed that Lily had been in Europe during one or both of the world wars and was reliving some horrible experience in her mind.
It was hard enough to get a good night’s sleep in the hospital, and Lily’s terror when I tried to turn the light off didn’t help. When Dr. Cawsey stopped by during his usual morning rounds, I asked for sleeping pills, explaining why. He wrote the prescription, told the nurses to leave Lily’s light on, and suggested they pull the dividing curtain between our beds at night so that I could get some sleep.
No one expected that I would get my period after surgery. Usually, the trauma of the surgery would prevent menses, but for some reason, I still got my period.
Having your period after hip surgery presents a few issues.
First off, I was taking Warfarin, a rat poison used as a blood thinner to prevent clots from forming in my blood and traveling to my heart or lungs and killing me. Every day, a lab tech stopped by to take a blood sample to ensure my blood was at the proper consistency. If my blood was too thin, the dosage would be decreased, but if it was too thick, the dosage would be increased. No one, to my knowledge, had calculated how menses would affect dosages.
Secondly, I couldn’t wear underwear. There was no way to put them on with the traction apparatus, so someone had to figure out how to secure a pad. Before menstrual pads had sticky stripes that affixed to underwear, women used thick pads that had extra material at each end that went into a triangular shaped clip which was attached to an elastic band that went around your waist.
Also, there was a sheepskin under me to prevent bed sores and help with diaper rash and yeast infections from using the bedpan. Sheep’s skins were scarce in the hospital, so staining it with menstrual blood wouldn’t be good, and using a blue pad, a large square absorbent pad, would defeat the benefits of the sheep’s skin.
I suggested we unhook the chain at the top of my leg just long enough to get the elastic around my waist. It would take two nurses to pull it up over my legs and one to keep my leg stable once it was unhooked from the traction. It worked!
Something about being in a hospital changes your sense of privacy. Everyone is respectful of you and your body, but every single nurse assigned to you (and some who aren’t) has to help you bathe, and when you can’t get out of bed, bathing is challenging. Twice daily, I was given a basin with warm water to wash up, and nurses would wash my back and my bottom, then apply lotion to help the chafing from the bed linens. The bedding was changed every day. Sometimes, two nurses would work together, which was far more efficient, and other times my day nurse would have to do it alone. Every time my bed linens were changed, I had to lift myself off the bed using the monkey bar attached to the top rail of my traction and hold my body up while my sheets were changed.
One day, my day nurse brought Mark, a good-looking orderly whose dad was a well-known surgeon, in to help. Lots of the nurses had a crush on Mark, and so did I. When he came in the room to help, I said, “are you kidding me?! You are not helping change these sheets! I can’t hold myself up with one arm and hold onto my gown at the same time!”
Both Mark and my day nurse laughed. They both assured me everything would be fine and that he wouldn’t see anything he shouldn’t. They would hurry as fast as they could to get the sheets changed.
When two people changed the sheets, one would stand on either side of the bed, grab hold of the sheets and move to the opposite end, stipping the bed, then perform a similar movement making it. It was pretty efficient, and I didn’t have to hold myself up long. This time, of course, Murphy made an appearance! They decided to work from bottom to top, and someone caught my gown on the way up. As soon as I felt the gown go up, I let go of the bar, crashed into the bed, and covered my face with my hands. Mark had turned and faced the wall as soon as he saw the gown go up, and the nurse quickly covered me up. It was hard not to laugh. It took some convincing for me to let them continue to make the bed, but they did.
Later that day, Mark returned to the room for a visit. He had made a balloon from one of the latex gloves and hung it from my traction bar as a peace offering! He had drawn a face on the hand part of the glove and colored the fingers like hair. It was a nice gesture that endeared him to me even more.
One night, we were all startled to hear the fire alarm going. It was after visiting hours, and all of us in the room had already had our evening washes. We could hear a lot of scurrying going on outside in the hallway, and not too long after, someone closed our door. The doors were heavy, and we all heard the latch snap shut. It was quite some time before the alarm quit ringing, and a nurse came in to check on us. She told us there was a fire in the boiler room and that the fire department was already looking after it. I asked her how exactly I would get out if we had to evacuate, and she told me that they would have to unhook my traction and carry me down the stairs in a sheet. Bouncing down the three flights of stairs in a sheet with a broken hip did not sound like something I was eager to do, so I banked on the idea that the fire would be contained quickly.
The lady in the bed, kitty-corner to me, became really scared. I told her everything would be ok, but she couldn’t calm herself down. I suggested she come over to my bed and sit with me. Using her walker, she came over and sat in the chair beside me. I reached out and offered her my hand, and she eagerly took it. She was shaking so badly that the weights on my traction began rattling. When she heard the weights moving, she was scared that she was hurting me and wanted to let go of my hand, but I told her not to worry. She wasn’t hurting me, and if it helped to hold my hand, she could!
About an hour later, a nurse came and opened the door. The fire was out, and the firefighters had all gone. Everyone let out a sigh of relief. The lady who had held a death grip on my hand for that hour finally let go thanked me for helping her through it, and went over to her bed.
Six weeks after surgery, the traction came off, but I wasn’t allowed out of bed yet. I was told I had to wait another week before I could get into a wheelchair. Mary came in to tell me I would soon be transferred to Wascana Rehab hospital. She assured me I would be treated well at that hospital, explaining that I would go to physiotherapy twice a day. Every day, she would make a point of coming into the room to tell me about the rehab hospital. Looking back now, I realize Mary was giving me plenty of time to get used to going to a new hospital.
Exactly one week later, I was excited to see my morning nurse wheeling in a wheelchair for me. Another nurse had come in to help me transfer to ensure I wouldn’t fall. I remembered the fainting spell from last time, so I was happy to sit on the side of the bed for what seemed like a long time before standing on my good leg to get into the wheelchair. The transfer went well, and I was allowed to sit in the wheelchair for an hour that morning!
The following day, I quickly agreed when the nurse asked if I wanted to use the toilet instead of a bedpan. She left the room and came back with a commode. A commode is a wheeled chair with a hole in the center that fits over a toilet.
She helped me into the commode, then wheeled me into the bathroom. She asked if I felt ok enough that she could leave me there while I relieved my bowels. I told her I would be fine. The next thing I remember, I was back in bed. My mom was sitting beside me, chuckling. I was confused. I didn’t remember finishing on the toilet or going back to bed. I asked my mom what had happened and she told me I had fainted on the toilet! The nurse had to get an orderly to lift me back into bed.
That was the end of my out-of-bed adventures for that day.
Eventually, I could sit in the wheelchair for extended periods. I was happy to wheel around the floor, visiting with other patients. I could also head down to the TV lounge to watch TV and have a cigarette or two. That is until we got caught.
I say we because my mom would sneak packages of cigarettes in until one day, dad caught us both smoking in the TV lounge. He was shocked and angry with my mom. That ended my supply source for a long time.
A couple of weeks after the traction came off, Mary came to tell me a bed had come open at Wascana and that I would be transferred by ambulance the next day.
Shortly after breakfast, a nurse came into the room to tell me the ambulance was on the way. She provided me with a plastic bag to put my toiletries and other belongings in. An hour later, I was on a gurney, inside an ambulance, on my way to Wascana Rehab Hospital.
The hospital sits on the grounds of Wascana Park in the South end of Regina. It specializes in physical rehabilitation, not only for orthopedic surgery patients but also for work-related back injuries and patients who require prosthetics. There was also a ward for severely disabled children and another for veterans of the first and second world wars.
My room was in the hospital's first wing on the North side. Again, I had three other roommates, all of whom had new joint replacements and were at least 40 years older than me.
In this hospital, patients went to a large cafeteria for meals. The food was considerably better than regular hospital food, and once a month, residents of the hospital were treated to a special dinner. Tables donned white tablecloths and decorations, and the menu offered items such as steak and baked potatoes. There were also birthday celebrations, complete with wheelchair dancing!
Upon arrival, a nurse provided me with my daily schedule and explained all the rules. I wasn’t allowed to bathe without a nurse inside the room, and bath time would be scheduled for me twice weekly. The cafeteria opened at 8:00 am for breakfast, and my first physiotherapy appointment would be at 9:30 am. Lunch was served right at noon, and my second physiotherapy appointment was at 1:30. Supper was at 5:00 pm, and nearly every evening, there was some form of entertainment in the dining hall.
It didn’t take too long to get into that routine, and it didn’t take too long to realize that most of the seniors didn’t have the strength to wheel themselves down the hallway to the ramp to get to their physiotherapy appointments. I felt bad for them struggling, so I started towing them, one by one, to the end of the hallway. An orderly would then take them down the ramp to their appointment. Some days, I would tow two or three people at one time. They would line up behind one another and hold on to the handles of the wheelchair laughing and giggling all the way down the hallway.
A couple of weeks later, I learned I would be adding school to my daily activities. School? Yup. A tutor from the Public School Board would teach two compulsory Grade 12 classes: English and History. Additionally, History class would be with one other resident – a boy who had fallen out of a pickup truck at a grad party in June. He was paralyzed from the waist down.
Now, my days were completely full. I woke at 7:00 am, got into my wheelchair, washed up in the bathroom, went for breakfast, then went to physio, went back up to the main floor for school, ate lunch, then went back to physio again at 1. I had my second class in the afternoon, then a brief rest period before supper.
There was a piano in the dining hall, so I often played piano for everyone on the rare days there weren’t activities in the evening or sometimes just after supper. Occasionally, some of the other piano teachers from the music school I taught at would come to visit me, and we would all take turns playing for everyone. The seniors and the veterans loved it when I would play old wartime songs like It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree, or Land of Hope and Glory. I sometimes played hymns and even Big Band songs like In The Mood and Mame, but the seniors also enjoyed the songs I played from the 50s, 60s, and 70s! There’s nothing quite like music to make a heart sing!
It doesn’t take long to become institutionalized when you live in the hospital. My daily routines were just that – routine – but living in this hospital was different because I was mobile. I had a wheelchair.