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| I started feeling pain about the third night. Although I didn't remember it, I had been through two surgeries already, and where they had taken good skin from my back and thighs to graft over the burned areas was beginning to hurt. When they take skin from an area, it leaves the nerve endings completely exposed with nothing to act as a buffer. There were four surgeries all together. My fingers were bandaged and I couldn't bend my arms to press the call button to let someone know I was hurting. The room I was in was completely open to the hallway, and I could see the nurses padding back and forth. but no one looked my direction even though I was waving my arms trying to get someone's attention. I still couldn't talk, so yelling wasn't even an option. It was like one of my dreams where I would try to yell and could make no sound come out of my mouth. I felt like I was in a nightmare and would surely wake up soon to the alarm clock buzzing at 5am signaling that it was time to get up and get the kids ready for the school bus. But I knew it was real from the pain i was feeling. I've never felt physical pain in my dreams. A nurse finally came to my rescue. She came in the room all smiles and sunny faced and had the nerve to ask me, "Are you in pain? Your monitor's at the nurses station show you're feeling some discomfort." If I could've raised up out of that bed, I believe I would have showed her a thing or two about discomfort while I cheerfully strangled her perky little neck. I wanted to yell, "If you've got monitor's at the nurses station TELLING you when I'm in SOME DISCOMFORT, where the hell were you 15 minutes ago!?" But I couldn't so I lay there nodding my head yes. About a week into my stay I started fighting with them about the breathing machine, trying to make them understand that I felt like I was suffocating with it on me. I got pretty upset about it so they took the breathing and feeding tubes out of my nose. I could talk just above a whisper now. They started taking me to a room where they bathed me in a tub that looked like some of the watering troughs we used on our ranch for the horses and cows. They called it the TRAUMA tank. There would be four or five people working on me at once, male and female. The pain of having my burns scrubbed to keep out any infection made me forget about any sense of modesty, and although they always gave me a dose of morphine just before going, and halfway through the bath, it was never enough to take the pain away. It barely dulled it at all. I dreaded waking up in the mornings because I knew at 9 o'clock I would be headed for the tank room and another hour of unrelenting pain. |
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