For those of you who don't know (and anyone reading this probably does), Amanda is in the hospital following a procedure she's been counting down to for a number of years.
This blog post is not meant to speak for her. She's perfectly capable of that.
This blog post is about how incredibly scary it is to be a helpless bystander and how I operate as a binary function.
Let's begin on Monday. It was the first school day back after New Year's. I went into school for a half-day because schools in Thailand have yet again shut down and gone virtual because of a second wave of Covid-19. Monday night was the last night our lives felt normal. We danced around our apartment and cleaned up the GIANT mess I had made the night previously making pumpkin massaman curry.
Late Monday is when the nerves started setting in for me. I found it incredibly hard to get to sleep. By 4am, I had stopped trying. I got up, continued cleaning until the apartment shone, and then curled back up in bed until Tuesday morning at a more appropriate time to "get up".
Tuesday was relatively dull. We didn't have school because of the shutdown. We spent the day packing, generally bumming around the apartment, and watching movies. Amanda attempted a trip to the gym, but unfortunately that was also closed. Tuesday night was unpleasant. Anxiety is real. Amanda went to bed around midnight, but I doubt she got any good sleep. She spent hours tossing and turning next to me.
How do I know this?
Because I didn't even bother trying to sleep. I didn't bother so hard that I signed up for back-to-back veteran hard-mode trials in ESO (read: I signed up for difficult video game things that require paying attention and I play a role where if I'm not on my A game, everyone dies.). While my guild leaders were super excited (I don't mean to brag, but I am an excellent healer. Mom. If you're reading this, you're reading this correctly. In a virtual world where you can kill things in whatever manner you please, I dedicate almost 100% of my time to perfecting the art of keeping my friends alive to the point that none of my characters have the ability to do ANY damage. 15 year old me does not recognize 27 year old me.), it also meant that I wasn't even going to try sleeping.
Wednesday morning came early. We needed to be at the hospital at 10am for Amanda's check-in and it's about a 40 minute drive from our house. Amanda at this point was not allowed water or food, which she took like a champ, but her stomach was vocally upset about. In solidarity, I also abstained from breakfast (though I did POUND a liter of water while she went to the bathroom).
We made it to the hospital perfectly on time. In Thai standards, we were super early. 9:59.
Amanda went to the front desk to check in, but as she walked up, everyone got excited because EVERYBODY knew who she was and why she was there. (Also, all the staff love gossiping about her/us in Thai thinking that I don't understand them. I'm not going to let too much on because I think it's adorable.)
We settled into the waiting room and over the next three hours, Amanda was pulled into different rooms for different reasons: bloodwork, surgical markings, bloodwork review, consultations, photos, etc. I spent this time in the waiting room doing important things like JUDGING THE WEIRDOS IN THE WAITING ROOM.
The highlight of them was a woman in ... what I can only describe as a strip of cheetah-print velour spandex that started at about her nipples and ended so abruptly that if she dropped anything, we'd all get a show. She was wondering in broken English/Spanish/Thai (which is an odd combination for me to understand but at this point I have TOO MANY snippets of TOO MANY LANGUAGES floating in my head to remember what verbs go with which nouns) if the cocaine she snorted last night would affect her breast enhancement at 7pm.
My mental thought: "um... yes?"
The front desk: "... How much cocaine?"
**Fast forward a few hours: she did get her boobs done. Apparently it wasn't TOO MUCH COCAINE. Real question: I was raised to believe that any cocaine is too much cocaine. I wonder what the limit actually is... like... she obviously didn't die in surgery... so I guess she took an appropriate amount of cocaine?!? Sleep-deprived brain does not like this.**
Finally around 1pm we went up to a room on the fifth floor and were informed it was Amanda's room for the upcoming stay. It's comfortable. Honestly it's only a touch smaller than our entire apartment.
After maybe 15 minutes of settling in, the translator came in with a couple members of staff and asked if we were ready to pay.
Um? No. We were told that payment was on checkout, so we didn't bring it WITH US.
However, the hospital was not going to proceed until we had paid. (They had previously had foreigners go through with operations only to not pay and then leave the country.)
So off I went back to our apartment to put finances in place and then drive back to the hospital. All in all, it was about a 90 minute roundtrip. When I got back to the hospital, Amanda was chained to the bed by an IV line.
Around 3:30, a nurse and the translator (who I also think was the surgeon's assistant?) came to grab Amanda. The put her in a wheelchair and off they went...
So began the waiting. Luckily a friend in the area knew this was happening and she offered to come over and distract me for a couple hours. We went out for dinner (Gusto Sushi - Amanda wrote about it in a previous post), found the weirdest coffee shop with some adorable, albeit inbred, kittens, and then definitely got mysterious viruses from the most filthy Swenson's I've ever visited.
She left around 7:30pm and I was back to waiting.
I don't wait well.
So I did all the schoolwork I was assigned (as we're now back online). Unfortunately, I'm now too good at that and what was supposed to take me 10 hours (and it IS taking my coworkers that long if not longer) took about 3... and that was with frequent breaks and dancing.
Almost immediately after recording the last video, (10ish pm) a nurse came into the room to take Amanda's empty bed down to recovery. I wrongly assumed that meant she was getting close to done.
I asked the nurse in Thai what roughly translates to: "What is the time the professor of scissors will finish with the orange hair girl?"
She laughed so hard that she needed to prop herself up on the bed and responded in PERFECT English: "I'm not sure. My best guess would be a little after five in the morning? But I'm not in the surgery and I'm not the doctor."
She left with the bed and I now had a vague idea of when Amanda would return.
I think what bothers me most about the surgical process in Thailand is the lack of updates. If I wouldn't have gone out of my way to ask a nurse, I would have found nothing out until Amanda was back in the room.
Again, I didn't bother sleeping. There's a small 'fainting couch' in the room that I fit on just fine (thank you, tiny genetics) but it's uncomfortable and Amanda had now been gone for 10 hours.
I did some stretching.
I watched several documentaries by Absolute History. Definitely look them up on YouTube. They're EXCELLENT.
I practiced handstands... I'm terrible at them, but it's a great way to kill 30 minutes.
I dug around the bathroom looking for soap to wash my hands with only to discover that the ONE THING this hospital room doesn't have is SOAP.
WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF A PANDEMIC AND THERE IS NO SOAP IN THE BATHROOM.
It's cool. I've since gone to 7-11 and fixed that issue.
Finally I settled into the couch with a bottle of water and started watching Absolute History's "Medieval Men Who Ate Bread Off of Corpses" because that's how rabbit holes work when I heard the keycard door start to beep.
5:18am.
That nurse was eerily correct.
Amanda spent the next 36 hours coming out of the anesthesia and it was equally brutal on both of us.
First, we found out that her surgery had not been completed. Only one of the two procedures had been done because the anesthesiologist deemed her under for too long. This was glaringly obvious: Amanda still has her wings.
Secondly, I have never experienced someone coming off of general anesthesia. I had googled it, but I wasn't ready for it in person. Her blood pressure tanked. Nurses ran in and out with drugs, fluids, and beeping machines. The Thai whispers were hushed and rapid. I could only make out words I knew from teaching small children during a pandemic: "pressure too low", "fever", "antibiotics", "sick".
She was groggy. She didn't know where she was or who I was. Adorably, for a while, she thought I was her mother and proceeded to tell me how beautiful I was and how much she likes my butt... I'm not sure why she thought her mother needed to know that, but it was cute nonetheless.
The nurses forced 1000ml of water down her throat with a slew of small pills before she started vomiting. From that point on, I turned into my mother. Nobody got to touch Amanda, put anything in her mouth, or put anything in an IV before answering the question: "Why?"
No answer? You can't explain it in baby Thai or broken English? Go find someone who can.
The nurses found out real fast that the instant Amanda takes a turn in the negative direction, this Genie shapeshifts into a Banshee.
The results?
Every single time someone walks into Amanda's room, they announce why they're here.
Back home, we take advantage of the fact we can communicate with everyone: nurses, orderlies, doctors. It was jarring to be treated almost like a child: go sit on your couch while the adults do their work. My mother can attest that has never worked on me.
Since my brief, but rather violent flare, the nursing staff has been pleasant, quietly vocal, and I am their middleman.
Pills in a container? Oop. Better explain each of them to Teacher Genie like she's an idiot.
And Teacher Genie is a special version of regular Genie. Teacher Genie can ask a four year old what color the white horse is until she's blue in the face. No really. One of the verbal test questions for term one's final was "What color is the white goose?" and I asked it to 180 different 4 year olds at least once.
Random cup full of a mysterious white liquid? You're definitely going to need to tell me what that is.
Injection at a non-scheduled round time? What's in it? What's the dosage? Standard for this procedure or is this a special order?
The best interaction happened last night with dinner. Amanda wasn't hungry when it was delivered, so I went into the nurse's lounge around 10pm to use their microwave. The loveliest nurse was in there. (She's stunning and nice. I mean this in every sense of the word lovely.)
"The nurses are afraid of you."
"Is it because I ask questions and demand actual answers?"
"Yes. It is not very Thai."
"Nor am I."
We then had a lovely conversation about travel in Thailand and how nice it has been to go exploring without the millions of farang tourists.
"You do not sleep. We try to go in when you sleep, but you never sleep."
"I'm too scared to sleep."
"You know, you are not very scary."
"Now we both know that, but there's no need to tell your friends."
*winks* *walks back to Amanda's room with hot soup*
I spent most of that night chatting with people on various messengers. Amanda has a friend who will be having a very similar procedure done later this week. She was a glorious person to bounce everything off of. It was also incredibly cool to hear the differences between their procedures.
Friday, Amanda really started to perk up. She demolished her breakfast and as soon as lunch arrived, it was gone. She was itching to sit up and we spent a good portion of the day moving her arms and legs. She took a nap between breakfast and lunch and another short nap after she finished her lunch.
The day was full of pushes of energy that lasted just long enough to do one thing: sit up, check Line, respond to one person. She received many messages of support and love. She read them all and replied to as many as she found energy for. But this process really has proved that Amanda and I can sit in companionable silence for hours on end.
I also had to explain to her that a coup was currently occurring in our home country. Imagine waking from anesthesia to the beginning of The Handmaid's Tale. But if I didn't get to her before Rachel Maddow or Twitter, she wouldn't be too pleased with me.
Dinner for Amanda came early: about 5pm. She thought it was early. In reality, that's what time dinner came the night before, but she was so out of it that it took until 10pm for her to be interested in trying it. She wolfed down the fried rice and deemed it "boring, but passable".
Our friend from earlier stopped back in to check up on Amanda. We ordered Poke Bowls and I'm afraid we made Amanda quite jealous with the smells of sushi wafting across the room. By the end of the short visit, Amanda was completely wiped.
I'll give this to our friend, she knows exactly when to leave. Not that she isn't welcome, but she reads signals impeccably.
Amanda took another short nap and we settled into an evening of quiet podcasts and me working on Google Slide presentations for school. Inevitably I ended up procrastinating doing actual work and ended up on Twitter and then here.
For now, that's it.
It's 6am on Saturday. Amanda is officially 2 days out of surgery and itching for the next step. Hopefully it involves physical STEPS because she's itching to get out of that bed.
And me? I'll sleep when I'm dead.
