My surprise -- and a tip that might help some.
My surprise -- and a tip that might help some.
I had a little "challenge" before my breathing tube came out, that included a surprise and a "tip" for people still on their way there:
The surprise was basically that my wife of 15 years and I turn out to terrible at communicating via Charades! We are both quite good with words, and chat in high-speed streamlined code. Not bad at the usual non-verbal snuggling communication, either -- but how DARE you ask such a question?!?
![Smile :) :)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
But when I was being roused from the OR sedatives, and they were trying to figure out if I could handle the breathing thing without the tube, I developed one message that I believed was ABSOLUTELY VITAL (probably not just to my survival, but to the survival of THE WORLD -- I'm like that!), which I somehow needed to convey to the gathering -- my concerned wife and 3 or 4 Health Pros -- with only the use of my mostly bare fingers and toes.
When my wife tried playing Charades with me, she went WAY faster than I could possibly keep up, and the more frustrated I got, the faster she went. But that meant that by the time I had a chance to nod "Yes" at one of her suggestions, she'd already made a dozen new ones, so there was no way to establish contact.
In fact she actually did tell them a version of what I thought they might need to know -- that I'd only gotten THREE HOURS of sleep the night before my surgery, because I was up crazy late trying to finish and "perfect" a final Argument at the end of a long regulatory hearing I'd been participating in. (OK, probably not my smartest bit of scheduling ever, I admit!) But she said I'd had FIVE hours sleep, and correcting that "five" to "three" THEN became the most important thing in my part of the universe!! (I think I already mentioned that I'm like that! Besides, I can often function reasonably well on five hours, but not three!))
I don't know if I was really in danger from a bad decision, but (a) it felt like I might be and (b) I was feeling so exhausted, much like I was when I rousted myself out of bed, that I really just wanted to go back to sleep, even if it meant keeping that damn tube down my throat!
In a smarter universe, (a) I wouldn't be quite so much of a jerk, and/or (b) Wendy and I would have spent a half-hour practicing communicating some sample messages with only fingers and toes, no words, and/or (c) one of the Health Pros would have walked up to Wendy and said "Ma'am, I know how stressful this must be for you, but I had a 2-hour workshop on this kind of communication in Nursing School (or wherever), would you mind giving me a try?"
In short, communicating that way is not something any of us is born very skilled at. And learning it "on the job" is WAY too hard! But I bet it can be learned, and taught. And for my $0.02, I think it should be taught to the Pros who are involved in OR recoveries with chest tubes.
And it also wouldn't hurt for family members etc. who are going to be there when the patient is snapped out of it, to have practiced a bit first.
Oh, yeah, and the other big surprise from when I first opened my eyes: My brain and perceptions seemed to be roughly 7 seconds behind real time!! E.g., I remember hearing one of the guys tell me sternly NOT to bite the tube in my mouth. And I remember thinking "What on Earth is he talking about, I'm not biting the tube??" And a couple of seconds afterwards, I remember the feeling in my mouth, as I bit (or finally realized I'd bit) the tube -- not once, but TWICE! (That time lag clearly made our Charades harder, and might be something to try to factor into the "workshop" or "practice". )
Psychotropic drugs are weird, for sure!