drainage

This post is about surgical drains and maybe isn't for the weak of stomach. Because surgical drains are pretty gross. There is also a picture of my actual drain, so the whole post is after the jump in order to keep the picture from popping up on your screen as soon you arrive here.




Leading up to the surgery, I think it's fair to say I didn't have the means to prepare for the pain, the scars, the swelling and pulling, the course glue over the incisions, the mangled appearance of my body. Since surgery, it's hard to look at myself. It's like assessing the damage from a bad accident, all these bruises, incisions, and all this missing tissue. Every time I look in the mirror, my heart hurts a little. This is difficult to digest.
In lieu of my inability to prepare for all of the physical scars and my emotional reaction to them, I fixated on the drains, these clear plastic bulbs hanging from long clear tubes that would be inserted into my skin to allow the fluid build up from my cut-apart tissue an outlet. These I could see, a nurse handed one to me and showed me how to go about emptying it. It was tangible whereas the rest of my post-op features were not. Complications arise from allowing this fluid to build up in the body, so I understand the necessity of the drains, but seriously, this shit is gross. It's unnerving to see a tube protruding from a tiny incision in your skin, to see it affixed there with a thin black thread, to feel the sharp tug of that stitch on skin when you move. Worse yet is being able to see and touch the part of the drain that lies under your skin collecting the potentially damaging seepage of your tissue. It isn't just fluid that drips into these drains either, on occasion a strand of actual tissue makes its way into the drain, a long, thin piece of myself trailing through a tube to eventually be emptied and flushed down the toilet. Weird. The whole thing is weird. (That sounded overly sentimental - I have no problem with the loss of the tissue threads other than the fact that it is a little gross and strange to see them.) Well, the drains are slowly making their way out of my body. Two down, one to go. The removal process is uncomfortable and in preparation for having the single stitch cut and the eight or so inches of drain tugged from my body, I tend to make a lot of fearful, whiny noises and hyperventilate a little. My hands go weak, then I take one big breath in and the nurse tugs quickly, plastic stinging the tiny incision and it slithers out. Gross. For the curious among you, there is a photo of one of my drains that the nurse left in the office sink yesterday after removing it.

 It's not very clear, but an inch or so above the white portion of the tube is a black dot which marked the point where the drain was stitched to me, so everything beyond the black dot was inside of me. 

I'll tell you about the pockets that made this whole system manageable in another post. They're too lovely to share this space, I think.