Now, sleeping on the ward was a challenge to say the least. In fact, it would have served as a good opportunity to run sleep deprivation studies. After the operation, I was on 15-minute checks. This meant that every fifteen minutes, I would be woken up, asked a series of obvious questions (well, obvious to someone who wasn't delirious), and subjected to blood pressure and pulse checks. The machinery used sounded like a portable BBC Radiophonic Workshop. In a group of four beds, with each groggy patient on fifteen minute checks, this meant the equivalent of a non-stop, terrible 80s disco.
On waking up (again), I was feeling uncomfortable. I tried to shuffle in my bed, and realised that my movement was being restricted by my catheter tube being caught. Now I hadn't remembered being fitted with a catheter bag, nor had I remembered drinking the fourteen pints of lager that could have been the only explanation for the enormous amount of fluid in it. I had been nil by mouth for nearly twenty four hours, give or take the cup of water, so was confused by my deposit. "They put about four litres of fluid in you during the surgery." A nurse told me as I untangled my tube, and my attention turned to my neck.
The room was warm, I was warm, but the back of my neck was cold. I investigated what was going on, and felt dampness behind my head. I was in bed, and propped up to about forty-five degrees. I was leaking. This inspired a moment of panic, but I was assured by the nurses that this was totally normal. In light of the fact that I been pumped to the gills with fluid during the operation, it really shouldn't have been surprising that some of it was trying to escape. The nappy-esque wadding that was covering my pillow was changed, and I was comfortable again.
The reality was that my scalp had been opened, and a section taken out of my skull to allow access to the tumour. I have studied the human body, and I know how tissues repair. My head just needed to time to start knitting together, and seal itself up. It was just hours after the surgery, and my body's recovery had to catch up with the miraculous recovery of my brain.
I was desperate to test my ability to stand up, but knew that my body and brain had just undergone the most stressful day of its life. I was still sluggish as a result of a mixture of the anaesthetic, and the trauma suffered by my brain. I was being given steroids to prevent inflammation of my brain, and pain killers (if my memory serves me correctly). I tended to just see off the cocktail of pills I was handed without many questions. I hadn't suffered any pain in particular (apart from when I laughed), but assume that the levels of pain medication I was being given, or had been given was taking care of that. As a nurse took a sample of my blood, I asked what it was for. "We're monitoring your blood for signs of infection." He replied. That was curious...they'd opened my head up, taken out a mass of cells, and closed me up. Surely I was on a potent cocktail of antibiotics? Apparently not. After brain surgery, it seems that the doctors don't like to give you antibiotics, as they can interfere with your normal biological defences. I've never liked relying on medication, and would always try to hold off. This would've been an exception, as I was desperate for everything to go well, but in Mr Ross I trusted.
Despite my urge to get up and about, I tried not to rush myself, and was satisfied by sitting up, and trying not to leak. I had put a request in for a selection of cold juices, as my mouth still felt like I'd been chewing on sand for a week, and let myself drift off to sleep again. I got the feeling that this was the best way of speeding my recovery along, also knowing that my night would be disturbed by the quarter-hourly ward discos.
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