ICU tubes and blood

One can never be prepared for seeing their "loved" ones in a hospital bed with tubes and machines attached.

Last night I went to see Farmer .. he was 2 hours out of surgery , (a five hour surgery) , and still heavily sedated. He was in ICU.

The room was four beds each with their own personal nurse to check and care for the paitent .. I take my hat off to them , cos most of the time the paitent was asleep and doing nothing .. but they had to watch the machines , bleep and bink and check that everyhting was going well ..

I stood at the end of the bed and chatted to the nurse about how it all went .. everything was fine .

Then I walked to the side trying to stay out of her way and just held his hand.

I had told him I would

Nurse fiddled about with dials and pumps and took his obs.. then measured and fitted a compression stocking to his good leg .. ( I say good leg as they stripped a vein from the other one to use in the heart)

All that movement must have made him aware of where he was and he started to moved and gag on the tubes down his throat.. his legs thrashing about and lifting himself, trying to grab at his face with hands and arms full of lures and monitoring wires.

The nurse came to his side and called his name , he nodded , she said open your eyes .. he could not.. she said squeeze my hand he did ..

He was not ready to wake but was a little aware of his surroundings , she said the main thing was to keep his hands down so he did not pull out the tubes, he was fully ventilated.

I held his hand down and brushed his forehead and whispered in his ear that he was in ICU , he had had the op, that he was fine .. just relax and wake up slowly when you are ready .. can you feel pain? ( he nodded) .. she pumped his pain relief and I just cooed i his ear about how well he was doing .. he was going to be ok .. held his hand from flailing about and he calmed down .. and the meds kicked in and he went back to sleep. .. he did that 3 times while I was there.. apart from the young man in the bed beside us who was due to wake and be moved … Farmer was the only one moving and trashing .. his nurse doing all the work in the room .. lol

I cried all the way home ..

Not because he was in a mess .. not because of the sights I saw .. no, I cried  because he was all alone and when the dr tried to call the family all he got was answer machines and had to leave messages.. no one came no one talked to staff.. they all looked at me and said do you live here, can we have your number .. what is your relationship with him ? ..

I didn’t think that old occasional lover was a good enough reason .. so I just said best friend. They took my number and name.

I will go back today and see him ..

TTFN..xox