The Beginning...it is finished.

This was going to be my 5^th and I hope final surgery on my left knee since a major injury way back in 1974. With much nervousness I waited in the pre-surgery room.  Waiting, listening to every sound, wondering  when the party was going to start. The worry made every minute seem like 10 the clock wasn’t moving. It was time to get this over with. Finally nurses entered my room and wheeled me out and down the hallway.

The last recollection of consciousness that I have before my knee replacement surgery was being wheeled into what looked like a large room full of tools, lights, machines, and parts on tables. There were people moving about totally covered in masks, goggles, gloves, and surgical garb. I was looking for my doctor. Dr. David Field. I trusted him, I picked him to be the one to cut my old knee out today and replace it with a mixture of alloys and synthetic parts. He was nowhere to be seen. Was he here?

I could tell they must have put some sort of a sedative into my IV drip. Everything became a dream in dream there was nothing to be worried about any longer. The last thing I remember was a man leaned over and introduced himself as my anesthetist and helped me up to sit and lean over some device and place my chin into a cup to help support my leaning position. I knew what he was going to do, he was going insert a syringe between two of my lower vertebras and inject a solution into my lower spine that would totally deaden everything on my body from that point down.  I felt his fingers pushing very hard against my lower vertebras or was it a syringe?

Then all lights, all consciousness left, the butchery started, the saws, drills, scalpels, and trained hands  went to work.   

There was no time gap from that point to now. It seems instantaneous I was laying in the recovery room. It is like waking up from a strange dream, and then going in out of it for the next couple of hours. Slowly the ‘outside world’ becomes the denominate reality. Now I remembered I had knee replacement surgery.

I was wondering how it went as I watched blurry people walk back and forth and talked to each other in words I could not quite understand or could not quite hear. I closed my eyes again and left the room in my mind as somebody shook my arm and called my name. “David” and said “Surgery went well you are in the recovery room.”

I was now starting to think more then I was sleeping. Looking around I could see digital readings on devices around my bed. There were sensors attached to my body letting the medical staff know what was going on inside of me. There was an IV bag dripping fluids into my body through a needle that was taped to my left wrist. I had a catheter in place letting the IV fluids drip back out.

I saw my two feet sticking out of the sheets, no matter how hard I tried to move them, wiggle my toes, nothing moved.

I saw my lady, sitting next to me, that helped comfort me.

I reached under the covers and it felt like I was touching somebody else, it wasn’t me there was no feelings to be felt.

Somehow the day drifted into the evening and evening drifted into the night, I was now alone with my thoughts, listening to hospital sounds, as I drifted in and out of sleep.

I was starting to feel restless, distressful, a spinal tap stops pain totally, but unlike narcotic pain control does not give that calming effect that has become a national addiction dilemma.  I still could not move my legs much and I kept trying to pull myself up, using my arms to try and sit up. Feelings and pain started to show up in my left leg. My leg felt warm and sweaty I thought.

My automated Blood Pressure check started. It automatically starts cuffing my arm every 15 minutes so if I did dose off it wakes me. My blood pressure had been running alarming high, and I was told it was due the pain and trauma involved with surgery. 

This time it topped the charts with the high end being 175 which triggered an alarm at the nurse’s station. A nurse quickly arrives and alarmingly notices there is blood on the edges of the mattress and pulls back the covers we both see I am lying on a blood soaked mattress and my leg gauze is also soaked in blood. A second nurse arrives and my leg wraps are rapidly stripped off. Now we see the source of bleeding. In my moving around the two tubes that were left inside my leg and attached to a pump to help drain excess blood and fluids were pulled out. Blood was burping and one of the nurses applied pressure again the holes in my leg to stop the bleeding.