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I left my stomach in Mexicali
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I was meaning to do more updates from my well-appointed hospital suite in Mexicali Mexico but I was actually too high to type anything. Anyone who is considering going there must consider this first: their drugs are amazing. Also once you're embroiled in something so wildly outrageous there's not much time to put too many sentences together but I didn't forget about you guys.
I am...sleeved.
In an earlier post I mentioned that I was late to my surgery, which does not bode well for how timely I'll be to my own funeral. I woke up late. The bus was leaving the hotel without me. I told them to go. And I had a good twenty minutes to recalibrate my options. I am alone in Mexico in a pretty nice hotel. Shaping up to be a pretty gorgeous day with some bright golden sun whizzing down off the mountains and a bottle of unopened Water on the desk still cold from the air conditioning. Cervezas by the pool? I could probably pay somebody to take me back into San Diego, check out Sea World, go see the beach...
And then the phone rang and it was Yolanda and she scolded me and told me to get my ass downstairs to catch the shuttle so...that was that. I was back on the grid.
So since I was late, the first thing Lucy did was march me into x-ray and have me stand in front of the...radioactive chalkboard thing without my bra on. Then she dumped me in my room, gave me a gown and something she called a bloodthinner in a shot above my hip bone. It might have been called a blood thinner but I will call it Oblivion Elixir X because suddenly it did not seem odd at all that I was in a Mexican hospital in a gown about to have my stomach cut out. No, not at all. People do this, right? All the time?
The hospital was actually kind of cool. It reminded me of something out of a movie ( not, like, Apocalyptic Zombie Wars) or something from the 40's. It was intensely clean, with lots of marble and dark wood. A bank of pay phones right before the marble staircase that took you to the upper floors. It was kind of attractive in a way but clearly...you know, you're not in Kansas anymore, okay? This was not an American hospital. It was Somewhere Else.
Another hint regarding that would be the fact that basically nobody but the doctor and the people who worked for Dr. Aceves spoke much English at all. I've read accounts of getting sleeved from other posters who must have had an entirely different staff than the one that was on that week because *no one* I spoke to there knew more than what you could spoon out of a medical phrasebook.
Now here is the thing about people who do not speak your language. They are annoying. They are just as annoying to you as you are to them. How fun is it really to have anyone charge at you with their mouths moving and this gibberish coming out.? And don't get me wrong -- these were nice people. Nice, professional, clean, concerned, hard-working, and intent on communicating but..no ingles. This was an inconvenience that ranged from merely a nuisance to verging on infuriating ( I think, but as I said I was too high to really notice much of my internal state) so if you go there -- COME PREPARED or at least more prepared than I was. Also, when I say the staff was concerned and professional I'm overlooking the time I came out of my room at four in the morning looking for a pain pill and saw no one behind the desk, until I came closer and saw this kid in hospital whites who had fashioned a kind of a bed out of three or four office chairs behind the counter. One of the chairs sat lower than the others so he looked like he was sleeping almost upside down, like a bat.
But, you know, no harm done. I woke up Batkid and got my pain pill and all was well.
The other problem was NOISE. In SPANISH. The hallways of the hospital are broad and sparkling marble, and right at the end of the hall was what appeared to be a chapel and an intensive care unit, divided from us by one thin glass door. My room had a window that looked out onto the hallway and for some reason, no matter what time of day it was, people wanted to collect right under it and conduct their business on their cellphones or in groups of four or five. There were also construction workers fixing stuff, some sort of frankenlab across the hall that had to be hosed down with a pressure washer, and various day-to-day conversations going on with the nurses at all hours about this and that. Part of the problem was the acoustics -- how quiet can you really be in a cavernous marble hallway? This is the kind of architecture you can do experiments with where you whisper at one end and the boyscout on the other end can hear you say, " eat my shorts" with perfect clarity. So as far as peace and quiet: no hope. If you are planning a trip to Hospital Almater I'd ditch the heating pad, which I did not need, and invest in an electronic spanish phrasebook and something you can stuff under the door.
My cellphone worked. Internet was out: I had to use my handy dandy Verizon wireless card which turned out to be even better because Amazon digital and Hulu were then on National Access and did not know I was not in the US and could not have House or Black Swan or Saturday Night Live.
All right, so after Oblivion Elixir X we the sleeve specimens were gathered into a room and Dr. Aceves came in to give his talk. He clearly gives this talk a lot. He talked about eating after surgery, using the sleeve as a tool, and etc. There was nothing that made it more clear to me how many of these things he's done because he had obviously given that talk about....who knows? A hundred? Five hundred times? It was a good talk but it mostly reassured me that this man was not *kidding* about his ability to punch my torso open and remove most of my stomach. He knew how to do this. If you need somebody to come around and take your stomach out, this is the guy to call.
It was decided that someone else be the first to get sleeved -- I was actually last because I got there late. Didn't bother me, I was on Oblivion Elixir and I just went to sleep -- and this was even *before* the real elixirs began to be handed out. So about...I don't know, three o'clock, Lucy woke me up and told me it was 45 minutes til my surgery. Then she gave me a pill. Okay, this thing was like the Matrix pill. Mine was not either blue or red but it sent me down the rabbit hole. Suddenly I wasn't even remembering that I was supposed to have surgery. I was on Planet Ten. On Planet Ten I supposed they did this sort of thing so I just went with it. I know I had to have gotten on a gurney at one point but I don't remember even that very well. I always saw people on tv getting wheeled down hallways on doctor shows and thinking geez that must be awful. Not the way they do it. I was just watching the lights go by. Then suddenly I was in this room and above my head was a light fixture that looked like a pretty spider. I felt something a little cold in my IV.
Fade to black.
I mean: BLACK.
I mean, don't even fade, okay, just: BLACK.
I know they gave me fentanyl and propanol and I also know they intubated me because they told me that before the procedure, but I had no idea it happened except when I woke up my voice didn't work right really for a couple days.
I said when I woke up. Which was not in recovery. It was not even after recovery. It was like eight hours later and the thing that woke me up was I had wet the bed. Actually I knew something was sort of wrong with my bed for a long time before I even bothered to wake up. I'm not real proud to admit that but...oh my god, what was in that stuff? Not even my bladder woke me up? THAT is some good shit people.
So I got out of bed. Sore in the upper left ribcage. There was a kind of pain that felt like someone was taking the two edges of my stomach and pulling it apart. Not terrible, I'd give it a four. I could feel the drain in my abdomen -- also uncomfortable. I called Batkid with the nurse call button ( and by the way -- get that thing in a position you can REACH it) and he looked at my bed. Pee pee? He said. I nodded. Lo siento! I also said " I have pain" and he filled up my IV bag with a blissful shot of morphine, which is what you get in your IV for pain until you're off the IV. Worked fast, worked like a charm. No vomiting, no nausea.
I went back to sleep.
For the next two days it was a little difficult to sleep on either side. My belly was still tender and the drain was still in, but I managed to be passed out at just about every opportunity. I didn't really do a lot of walking -- I mean I did enough -- but mostly I wanted to sleep. This was when the NOISE started bothering me and I would dart out of bed with a snarl on my face to stare at the...I don't know what it was, a party? A meeting? Under my bedroom window until these people went away, which really meant they edged slightly down the hallway only to seep back up again under my window for some unknown reason. It was surreal. There was even a *sign* in spanish in plain view which said something like " no molesta la fat people" that nobody paid attention to. I finally employed the nurse, who would tell them -- no molesta la fat people -- and they ignored her too.
After the IV came out Breakfast lunch and dinner was chamomile tea, chicken broth, purple gatorade and diluted apple juice. The chicken broth was GREAT the first day and then sort of wore on you after a while. I stopped finishing it and drank water. I *loved* the apple juice though for some reason. I drank apple juice with lots of ice on the way home. I am a fan.
And then the drain came out and I could take a shower. Bliss, bliss, a Mexican motrin and more sleep. I got a picture taken of my new tummy, which was sort of a yawn since I have no idea what my old stomach looked like; they could have made it into some kind of internal topiary and I would not have known the difference. However, one thing that was really helpful was to get an eyewitness account of my internal organs. You don't run into too many people who have seen the inside of you and I thought it was a good idea to get a report. My liver was " a little fatty" -- other than that -- perfecto. No gallstones or gallbadder issues, pancreas, spleen, kidneys, all with excellent margins. My bloodwork came back okay too -- I'm a little anemic but other than that, I'm a healthy girl with fifteen percent of her stomach.
Dr. Aceves and Dr. Campos came by three times a day, every day.
Yesterday morning I woke up at 5:30, took a shower, picked up my breakfast to go of chicken Soup, chamomilla and purple gatorade ( also a big recommend) and went downstairs to sit outside and wait for Ernesto. He was delivering another crew of fat people to the facility and one of them looked at me and said, hey what procedure did you get? I told them the sleeve. They said, wow, you look great! You don't even look like you had surgery! And I said, well, listen -- don't worry.The drugs they have in this place are fabulous.
A couple hours later, I was on my way home. I did not need the gasx strips I made a point of buying. I did not need anything special -- there was a starbucks right by the gate and I got a big cup of plain chamomile tea with splenda and that held me over until Apple Juice Time on the plane. The movie was The Tourist. It was *terrible*.