Popeye

Dec. 17 2010

I sat there content in my warm socks, hospital gown and tarp-like shorts. Then, all of a sudden, the nurse pulled out 2 needles. That's when I started to really freak out. See this is my husbands fault. Earlier that morning, he told me that they aren't going to give me an IV. I thought for sure that this surgery was going to be all rainbows and roses. I started nervously rambling off and I think I intimidated this nurse just a tad. This is about when I felt this horrible pain. I thought for sure something was wrong. Everything was going black and I couldn't hear. My body ceased up and next thing I remember is smelling alcohol swaps three different times. When I finally came to I still felt the same pain and my arms were frozen. My nurse, Wendy, went and grabbed another women to check on me. The women grabbed my arm, said everything was good, and walked out. I thought I had wet the bed because I was sweating so badly. Then Wendy told me that I had a "vagal response".
  
See- when I was a tot and would fall and scratch my knee, I would pass out. Normal right? This happened on many occasions growing up so my mother really started to worry. She took me to the doctor and explained what was going on. He told to her that everything was fine, and that is just how my body deals with pain. So you would think that in this moment, hyperventilating and sitting in soaked sheets, I would be called dramatic- or unbelievable right?
 
Well there was a reason here. My dear, dear Wendy stuck the IV through my vein, right into my TISSUE. Oh and remember all that lovely fluid that was supposed to be hydrating my body? Was pumping into my tissue- making my poor arm look like Popeyes'. No wonder why I had this crazy reaction! Luckily, my body would eventually absorb this foreign fluid.
 
The anesthesiologist was the amazing man who found this fault about 20 minutes later. The next 20 minutes consisted of my vein "blowing up" and a group of doctors/nurses singing Christmas songs to me. I was told that this was the first time they had sang to someone over the age of four. I was pretty famous in the hospital that day. Everyone seemed to know that a bunch of doctors were singing to a 20 year old girl.