ICU: Not a Place to Rest

I want to start out by saying I greatly respect all the ICU nurses that bust their butts to assure every patient is cared for. However, ICU is not a place to actually get any rest, and rest is what heals the body (at least that is what everyone likes to tell me). My blood pressure never helps me stay out of the ICU either. I have normally low blood pressure and then when my body is knocked out with general anesthesia and pain killers like Hydromorphine my blood pressure insists on staying in the range of a dead person. So off to the ICU I went. As soon as I arrived I asked the welcoming admin. nurse if I could go to the bathroom. She looked at me a puzzled and said sure, but gave me a bed pan. 'Umm hell no" I thought, but I graciously said I wanted to use the wide open toilet in my room. I had to pee bad, and I was not going to be modest. I whipped the sheets off my legs and began wrangling all the freakin' cords and started to get out of bed all while the nurse is huddling over me like toddler beginning to walk. "I am not used to my patients getting out of bed so quickly after surgery" she utters. If I was going to try to rest, I couldn't be holding onto a full bladder. Then ironically she gave me a big dose of that Hydromorphine and I was in and out of consciousness for the next 12 hours.

I was awaken by my night nurse telling me that my blood pressure was too low. And when she wasn't waking me, the monitor, that DOES NOT have a silence button (they know better in the ICU) was screaming loudly at me. I felt like I was getting in trouble for my declining BP, yet there wasn't anything I could do to raise it. If I asked the nurse to turn down the mad monitor, she would tell me that it is buzzing because my BP was too low (dah, can't help that). Then she would go on about if my BP would not rise, I couldn't get pain meds, and if the BP dipped too low I could go septic. I am sure these were all serious things, but all I wanted was for the blasted monitor to stop buzzing! I just wanted too sleep.

I did go 12 hours without painkillers because of my BP, and I now appreciate the night nurse's concern because that was a very agonizing period. About hour 7 into my 12 hours, they came in to insert a PICC line into a vein, so I could give myself antibiotics when I got home. The lady showed up and could tell I wasn't very excited. She asked if I wanted a cold wash cloth to keep the lights from bothering my headache and to shield my wondering eye from this whacked out procedure. I just took her up on the wash cloth offer and channeled my inner yoga breath to keep me calm. She used a dopplar to find the vein, sanitized the skin, numbed me up, and then somehow got a tube threaded through my arm, into my chest, and settled right above my heart. Except when they did an x-ray the tube didn't go towards my heart, but went up my neck. So the same poor lady had to come in and reposition the tube while asking me to move my sore neck in a way that isn't natural. This was to keep the tube from going into my neck again. Well the tube found my neck again and they finally sent me to the angio lab to position the tube while under x-ray. The guys in the angio lab were lucky because by then, the PICC line drama had risen my BP, so I could have painkillers and I was much happier with them. I am sorry I was so grumpy original PICC line lady, I know you were just doing your job! Plus, you got my BP up, so I got painkillers again AND I got out of ICU and moved to the 6th floor where I could rest!! So she is the real hero of this story!