Tell me your rxperiences

[pellicle]

You do you!

thanks ... I will

We should each do what we believe in.

Best Wishes

 

[LTRING]

I slept in the recliner for about a week. Every night seemed better and better.
Really helped with the discomfort.
But that first night back in bed….never to be forgotten.
Try a recliner. It will help.

 

[oo0My_Valve0oo]

just a thought in reply to this. I can't believe that for two reasons:

1. religion has spent so long denying and fighting against science
2. God is supposed to be omniscient and powerful, so why do lovely little children get incurable brain cancers (I spent a little time yesterday with a parent (the father) of just such a case.

My view is people believe what they want to believe, but my own beliefs are based in "minimal distortion of reality". Its my experience that the view "God is using people" to effect his will robs the people of agency and reduces their own efforts and diligence in education in the mind of the person saying that. They (I) worked long and hard to get the skills they have.

I hope you have a smooth and event free recovery.

Best Wishes

Forgive me for this off topic moment:

I love depth of thought. What does that mean? I mean peeling off layers and looking deep into things about life.

People believe what they want to believe. They believe what they believe. People also deny. They don’t believe what they want to believe. They fear what they believe. They doubt and fear the consequences. They doubt and hope.

It is interesting as an exercise in self-examination to look at the context when saying “can’t.” Most of the time we can do something if we are willing to do what it takes to do it. Being willing to do what it takes is revealing. There is a lot at stake that we are unwilling to put in jeopardy.

I am not religious. I am spiritual. The concept of “God” is not synonymous with “religion.” Mankind has probably been playing God ever since the concept of religion was conceived. Religion was probably made up for people to control other people. There may not be a supreme being but there definitely have been plenty of regular people taking it upon themselves to enforce rules according to what they believe are or would be their God’s. And many of those people have not really believed there actually is a God but fear there is a God and know they are not even close to living a lifestyle with their God’s stamp of approval. They project that fear into their environment. “The violators” aka “sinners” are everyone else. This serves a purpose. They have a means to fight an internal battle with themselves externally with other people.

I suspect you don’t have to be an aware person. You can learn something even if you are an ignorant simpleton. The basics of life are everywhere in everything, whether complicated or simple. We pass through many layers of detail and simplicity to get to more detail and simplicity.

Regarding point #2, if there was a God would you expect to experience and see bliss and perfection everywhere? With imagination can you come up with a purpose and objective which might explain why no one has everything go perfectly wonderfully blissfully happily from birth to death? What about a newborn who dies quickly? Do you think that being would be oblivious to the uprooting from the comfort of womb thrusted through a tight passageway out into an unfamiliar spacious void and eventual pain of that first breath, let alone the common slap on the bottom? (Do they still do that?).

How different it must be outside when all you have known has been inside, provided you have had a loving and welcoming mother and the birth process allows you to get reacquainted with that nurturing presence you have been within, now from the outside. In this scenario this newborn dies quickly. Can you imagine anything to be gained by those involved, (i.e. parents, the child, doctors, nurses, hospital, etc.)? If you only needed to make something up what, if anything, could you imagine benefitted anyone involved?

Is there anything to be gained by exerting effort, experiencing loss, pain, guilt, shame, rejection, etc.? We live in a dichotomous world. To have something there must be not having it. There is no light without darkness. There is no darkness without light. If all you have is comfort can you know comfort? Can you “gain“ without “loss“?

We humans believe we are special. We are surrounded by examples of things existing and ending under varying circumstances yet we expect to live long pleasant lives. Then when something doesn’t fit that scenario we get upset, ”Why?” “Why?” ”Why?” There can’t be a God if this happens! The question to ask is “Why not?” because the answer is reflected everywhere. Because the answer is everywhere there is no question. It’s the point.

 

[thomas999]

Whatever medications or drugs you are taking definitely come into play as far as your mindset is concerned. It is amazing how drugs influence our attitude and outlook. I don't know what you are taking if at all, but anesthesia wreaks havoc on many people. For me, there were a few heart maintenance drugs that just tore me to pieces emotionally. I had to find out what worked for me and go with it. When I did everything leveled off. Having open heart surgery is quite invasive both physically and mentally, it is not a natural thing for humans to go through.

 

[Paleowoman]

Can we talk post
Surgery? I am still in a lot of pain. I can’t find a comfortable place to sleep.

I was in a huge amount of pain post surgery. I was prescribed Tramadol which is supposed to be an opioid but I got no pain relief from it - not everyone does, something to do with the way the liver handles it - and I got terrible side effects from it. GP prescribed me Oramorph but I kept throwing it up so I ended up with bad pain until around 4 weeks post surgery.

I slept, so to speak, propped up with large cushions on our sofa downstairs - during the night I'd write on forum as with the time difference there were people still up in the US and certainly down under in Oz so I got some comfort from forum members. I was prescribed Zopiclone to help sleep which did give me a bit of sleep.

I would stroll gently around the house during the day for exercise. All in all it was a rough time. So 4 weeks post surgery the pain began to lessen and at around six weeks I found I could lie down - hurray - on my side which was easier to sleep on. Things moved forward fast then. You'll get there, it's just at the beginning post surgery it's bad.

 

[preciosa1974]

I was in a huge amount of pain post surgery. I was prescribed Tramadol which is supposed to be an opioid but I got no pain relief from it - not everyone does, something to do with the way the liver handles it - and I got terrible side effects from it. GP prescribed me Oramorph but I kept throwing it up so I ended up with bad pain until around 4 weeks post surgery.

I slept, so to speak, propped up with large cushions on our sofa downstairs - during the night I'd write on forum as with the time difference there were people still up in the US and certainly down under in Oz so I got some comfort from forum members. I was prescribed Zopiclone to help sleep which did give me a bit of sleep.

I would stroll gently around the house during the day for exercise. All in all it was a rough time. So 4 weeks post surgery the pain began to lessen and at around six weeks I found I could lie down - hurray - on my side which was easier to sleep on. Things moved forward fast then. You'll get there, it's just at the beginning post surgery it's bad.

Tha k you so much for this post! I felt like you completely understood. My doctor is open to adding some meds the Norco which is good. She wants me to try heat or ice to see if that works as week. I can’t believe you suffered through it! When I try to push through I get depressed bc it’s like every movement causes pain. How long ago was the procedure?

 

[Paleowoman]

How long ago was the procedure?

It will be nine years ago on 6th January.

I have a tissue valve so I will need a redo at some point. One surgeon told me the valve I have has an average lifespan of ten years but some people on here had theirs last longer. Regardless I will doubtless be going through all that pain again when I have the redo but I know it will get better so I'm prepared with that knowledge.

 

[Paleowoman]

When I try to push through I get depressed bc it’s like every movement causes pain.

It's very easy to get downtrodden by pain, I know, and there's nothing wrong with feeling that way, but it's like we don't have any choice if there's no medication which can help, so just hang in there and it will get better.

 

[ValveAdmin]

I never argue my faith and no one will ever sway me. But that’s ok friend. You do you! I trust God with all of my heart in the good and in the bad!!

Hey, did you know that you had 9 posts Tuesday which started at 1:52 am and ended at 4:54 pm?
I know you had breaks in between but not bad for somebody who just had major surgery.

Glad that you had a successful surgery. I know it's answered prayer for you.
Wishing and praying for your smooth recovery.

 

[pellicle]

I know you had breaks in between but not bad for somebody who just had major surgery.

being in hospital can be a boring place, so plenty of time if you ask me.

I've got a mate in hospital right now having just had CABG done AND got an infection in the graft site to boot. He's got plenty of time to chat

Just saying ;-)

 

[preciosa1974]

Hey, did you know that you had 9 posts Tuesday which started at 1:52 am and ended at 4:54 pm?
I know you had breaks in between but not bad for somebody who just had major surgery.

Glad that you had a successful surgery. I know it's answered prayer for you.
Wishing and praying for your smooth recovery.

My surgery was postponed to Thursday!! Haha!! But I’ll take any encouragement I can get. And yes, answered prayer in so many ways even with the complication!!

 

[preciosa1974]

being in hospital can be a boring place, so plenty of time if you ask me.

I've got a mate in hospital right now having just had CABG done AND got an infection in the graft site to boot. He's got plenty of time to chat

Just saying ;-)

Either way, it’s still nice to be encouraging to each other. Don’t you think?

 

[pellicle]

Either way, it’s still nice to be encouraging to each other. Don’t you think?

totally ... I posted a lot when I was in having my debridment surgeries

 

[carolinemc]

They sent me home with Tramadol which is an opioid. So - I guess it depends on the hospital. That said - I didn’t take ANY pain killers since 2 days post op. That includes Tylenol. I didn’t really need it.

They never keep you on strong pain pills for long. It was a pain for a few days, but with extra-strength Tylenol, I use the generic version, it helped.

 

[oo0My_Valve0oo]

I was in a huge amount of pain post surgery. I was prescribed Tramadol which is supposed to be an opioid but I got no pain relief from it - not everyone does, something to do with the way the liver handles it - and I got terrible side effects from it. GP prescribed me Oramorph but I kept throwing it up so I ended up with bad pain until around 4 weeks post surgery.

I slept, so to speak, propped up with large cushions on our sofa downstairs - during the night I'd write on forum as with the time difference there were people still up in the US and certainly down under in Oz so I got some comfort from forum members. I was prescribed Zopiclone to help sleep which did give me a bit of sleep.

I would stroll gently around the house during the day for exercise. All in all it was a rough time. So 4 weeks post surgery the pain began to lessen and at around six weeks I found I could lie down - hurray - on my side which was easier to sleep on. Things moved forward fast then. You'll get there, it's just at the beginning post surgery it's bad.

Tramadol has little effect on me for pain relief. It does not feel like a narcotic. The side effects remind me of non-narcotic substitutes all of which don't work on me and some make me feel sick.

Was your pain constant and somewhere deep in your chest? I awoke surprised that there wasn't more pain from the procedure. This was traditional OHS with a little smaller incision. My pain mostly came from movement and if I tried to change position to one which my body was not ready to allow. Coughing was rough.

The subjective barometer they use by asking us to rate on a 1-10 scale never made sense to me because it is always irrelevant. Smashing your finger in a door hurts off the scale but you are supposed to compare completely different things with your past experience. I tried using my own reference, gave up and said whatever to have another dose. They were never going to give too much. Here they are paranoid due to liberal dispensing in the past.

It helped with all the discomforts. Once I could rest in a comfortable position I felt exponential progress. Had I had medication allowing my body to relax in comfortable positions I probably would have healed faster. There would be a trade off in that I would be in positions before my body could allow it without pain relief so I might need pain med just from that alone but the jump forward once I could get quality rest seemed to have been so great I think the benefit was greater and don't think it would have been a wash.

 

[Paleowoman]

Tramadol has little effect on me for pain relief. It does not feel like a narcotic. The side effects remind me of non-narcotic substitutes all of which don't work on me and some make me feel sick.

Was your pain constant and somewhere deep in your chest? I awoke surprised that there wasn't more pain from the procedure. This was traditional OHS with a little smaller incision. My pain mostly came from movement and if I tried to change position to one which my body was not ready to allow. Coughing was rough.

The subjective barometer they use by asking us to rate on a 1-10 scale never made sense to me because it is always irrelevant. Smashing your finger in a door hurts off the scale but you are supposed to compare completely different things with your past experience. I tried using my own reference, gave up and said whatever to have another dose. They were never going to give too much. Here they are paranoid due to liberal dispensing in the past.

It helped with all the discomforts. Once I could rest in a comfortable position I felt exponential progress. Had I had medication allowing my body to relax in comfortable positions I probably would have healed faster. There would be a trade off in that I would be in positions before my body could allow it without pain relief so I might need pain med just from that alone but the jump forward once I could get quality rest seemed to have been so great I think the benefit was greater and don't think it would have been a wash.

I had traditional OHS with a full incision. Apparently the surgeon was going to do a smaller incision but wasn’t able to access my aortic valve with that - I have pectus excavatum (a depressed sternum) so perhaps that’s why. When I woke from the procedure I felt no pain at all - that first day I was in ICU and I felt well, I could do breathing exercises fine too. I don’t know what medication I was being given. Then that evening I was moved to high dependency. There I was given capsules/pills - they were Tramadol and dihydrocodeine. I very soon started feeling pain, constant bad pain in my chest all the time - I was given more of the tramadol and dihydrocodeine but they made no difference. No one asked me to rate my pain on a scale. That’s the way it carried on during my hospital stay of eight days. I was unable to do breathing exercises due to the pain…and it was essential that I do them but couldn’t. I would tell the nursing staff I was in pain…they just handed me the tramadol and dihydrocodeine which gave me such bad side effects - total shut down of my digestive system, both stomach and bowel, and eventually by the time I was discharged, hallucinations - not scary ones, just red dots crawling on the walls and smoke coming out of my computer, and hyperacusis - I stopped those pain meds since they weren’t helping with the pain and just gave side effects and I was out of hospital.

Reading on this forum of others’ experiences I realise that many here were on a very good pain medication through IV line or something like that for the first two or three days after surgery, and it was with something they could control to an extent too. I guess that was the kind of medication I was given just for the first day in ICU and then it was stopped. Why it was stopped so soon I don’t know. I think too the pain from the sternotomy I had might have been exacerbated by the pectus excavatum ? When I have redo I shall certainly make the medical team know of the pain experiences I had…and I’ll be going to a different hospital too !

 

[Critter]

just a thought in reply to this. I can't believe that for two reasons:

1. religion has spent so long denying and fighting against science
2. God is supposed to be omniscient and powerful, so why do lovely little children get incurable brain cancers (I spent a little time yesterday with a parent (the father) of just such a case.

My view is people believe what they want to believe, but my own beliefs are based in "minimal distortion of reality". Its my experience that the view "God is using people" to effect his will robs the people of agency and reduces their own efforts and diligence in education in the mind of the person saying that. They (I) worked long and hard to get the skills they have.

I hope you have a smooth and event free recovery.

Best Wishes

I always tell people that in the afterlife we will see a beautiful pastoral scene on a tapestry but in this life we see the flip side of that tapestry which looks like 100’s of threads going in different directions. It’s all about perspective.

 

[slipkid]

Can we talk post
Surgery? I am still in a lot of pain. I can’t find a comfortable place to sleep. I’m so tired and bordering on depressed. I pray daily and have a areknf faith hit this journey ain’t easy. What was your post surgery like? I feel
I could find comfort in how others handled things or just plain got through it!!

Like you I had a very difficult time sleeping. The #1 thing I needed was sleep but it was near impossible. Lying down was so horribly painful I could not sleep. The hospital bed was fine but a real bed - forget it.

I knew about the recliner recommendation but don't own one. One of my sisters went out and bought me like dozen pillows including the real long "body" pillow things (one of which I named after a really cute nurse I had in the hospital so I could pretend I was snuggling up with her to get some comfort! I still use it that way btw)....anyways....

So my bed became this odd pile of pillows which I would somehow burrow and orient myself in amongst all these pillows until I could find partial relief and get even the slightest sleep. Things were still pretty bad though so we decided to rent a hospital bed, set it up in the living room. BUT.....luckily...by that time about 3-4 weeks had gone by and during that time I got better, could sleep more in my pillow sanctuary so I nixed the hospital bed idea. And it was simply too much trouble (& money) to try to find/buy a recliner during that time anyway, I was financially wiped out by all the medical bills.

None of the pain meds worked well for me either. And I hated what they did to me (percocet made me hallucinate & feel nauseous). Tramadol/ultram didn't really do much for me. Pain was gone for me about 100% after about 6-7 weeks thankfully. I just got through it. You will too. Life & the human spirit is a pretty amazing thing. We get through all kinds of horrible stuff that we never thought we'd be able to do or survive. B4 you know it the negative side of OHS will be a faded memory.

 

[preciosa1974]

Like you I had a very difficult time sleeping. The #1 thing I needed was sleep but it was near impossible. Lying down was so horribly painful I could not sleep. The hospital bed was fine but a real bed - forget it.

I knew about the recliner recommendation but don't own one. One of my sisters went out and bought me like dozen pillows including the real long "body" pillow things (one of which I named after a really cute nurse I had in the hospital so I could pretend I was snuggling up with her to get some comfort! I still use it that way btw)....anyways....

So my bed became this odd pile of pillows which I would somehow burrow and orient myself in amongst all these pillows until I could find partial relief and get even the slightest sleep. Things were still pretty bad though so we decided to rent a hospital bed, set it up in the living room. BUT.....luckily...by that time about 3-4 weeks had gone by and during that time I got better, could sleep more in my pillow sanctuary so I nixed the hospital bed idea. And it was simply too much trouble (& money) to try to find/buy a recliner during that time anyway, I was financially wiped out by all the medical bills.

None of the pain meds worked well for me either. And I hated what they did to me (percocet made me hallucinate & feel nauseous). Tramadol/ultram didn't really do much for me. Pain was gone for me about 100% after about 6-7 weeks thankfully. I just got through it. You will too. Life & the human spirit is a pretty amazing thing. We get through all kinds of horrible stuff that we never thought we'd be able to do or survive. B4 you know it the negative side of OHS will be a faded memory.

First, thanks for making me laugh! I go from chair to chair but last night I actually was able to sleep in my bed with a bunch of pillows and slept for maybe 4 hours total! It felt like a victory!! I feel like the pain comes and goes. My problem is when it feels a bit better I start to do a bit more around the house and then the pain sets in. So I just need to remember this is just for a short time and then I get to clean, wash dishes, etc just like before! hahaha….. you are right. We get through stuff that’s bad and then look back and say, oh it wasn’t that bad!! I figure I have about 3-4 weeks of pain.

 

[Chuck C]

you are right. We get through stuff that’s bad and then look back and say, oh it wasn’t that bad!!

This is spot on. It one of those things where we can tell ourselves "this, too, shall pass. "