The time in the hospital for my hip surgery was okay. Because I couldn't put any weight on them, I was given a transfer board, which is pretty much just a wooden board that's about a foot long. I had to use it to get from the bed to my wheelchair, or from my wheelchair to the toilet, etc. I couldn't put any weight whatsoever on my hips. It was pretty hard. My arms aren't giant pipes by any stretch of the imagination, so I got tired pretty easily.
The feeling in my limbs took forever to come back. They slowed the flow of the epidural to try to give me some back. It's super awkward trying to figure out if the feeling is coming back by wiggling my toes. It's like trying to wiggle your ears when you don't know what it feels like. You have to think "wiggletoeswiggletoeswiggletoes" and then ask someone if they moved. They didn't want to just yank the thing out of my back because then it'd get the worse pins and needles feeling ever, and the pain of the surgery would hit me like a truck. So we eased into it. I was super excited once it finally came all the way back.
This time my roommate was an 18 year old girl named Ashley. She had something quite bad. Her side of the room was papered with posters and teddy bears, and she could do a lot of the stuff by herself without the nurses help, not because she wasn't that bad but because she was used to it. She was really nice, and it's another case where I feel much worse for her than I ever will feel about myself. I really hope she managed to get out of there and got to start her life.
This time I had a nurse name Julie. She was sooo nice. We chatted and stuff, she was really attentive. Sometimes you get nurses that care so much that you think they should be the role model of all nurses in the world, and Julie was definitely one of them.
The fourth day in, I got moved to a four person room because they needed our room for an isolation. Ashley had to take all her stuff down and pack up so she could put it up in whichever room she was in next. My parents asked if she wanted help, but she said she was used to it, so she did it on her own. They wheeled me into my new room and I transferred onto my new bed. Being in a four person room is completely different from a two person room; it's more like waking up in the recovery room, but then having to stay there and sleep there. The kids around me were a lot younger, so I needed to have lights out pretty early and got a pretty sucky sleep. The next day I got to meet a physiotherapist, who taught me a little more of the transfer board and made sure I could actually transfer myself and move myself in a wheelchair well. Then I was allowed to go! I got the IV ripped out of me, and we rolled our way to the front of the building where dad had pulled the car around.
Getting into the Opaz was a little difficult, but the seats are pretty worn in and low, so it wasn't ridiculously hard. I found it difficult to sit in the car though, because my hips were still extremely sore and I hadn't ever sat up for that long a time. We did it though, returned the chair (mine was at home), and drove off. It was a pretty rough ride for me, but no where near as rough as the brain surgery. Once we got home, we took out my chair, I transferred into it, we rolled me up the ramp and into the house, and then tucked me in to my guest room bed. Then I went to sleep.
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