UPPP Surgery – The Big Day

Being that the surgery is done under general anaesthetic, I wasn’t allowed to eat anything from midnight the night before the surgery – and I wasn’t even allowed to drink water from an hour before my scheduled admission time at 11am. So on the day of the surgery, I headed into the hospital to be admitted. Lots of paperwork, confirming my name and date of birth multiple times, then into a bed to wait for my turn at surgery.

The first time around I was there until after 4pm before they sent me home, and as you can imagine by that point I was pretty famished! Thankfully this time around there were no unforeseen delays and I was in a gown by about 12:30 and being wheeled towards the operating theatre by about 1:30. A bit of a chat to the friendly anaesthetist, a cannula in my arm, and into the theatre we went. Part of me was a bit disappointed I had to move myself from the rolling bed onto the operating table – it wasn’t like the hospital dramas on TV where they pick the patients up to move them. The anaesthetist put an oxygen mask on me, got me to take some deep breaths, and then fired some Fentanyl into the drip – the next thing I knew I was waking up in recovery a few hours later.

The first thing I noticed was the pain, or lack of it – after lots of reading about this operation in the lead up, I was expecting to be in agony but it was really not too bad. Turns out I’d had local anaesthetic injected into my throat while I was under, and that would take a while to wear off. The second thing was that I didn’t feel sick at all – last time I had surgery under a general anaesthetic I felt awfully nauseous in recovery, and I had serious concerns about that this time because vomiting after a throat operation didn’t sound like a pleasant experience at all! But I needn’t have worried, they may have given me an antiemetic just to be sure.

After they monitored me for a while they wheeled me into a ward for the night, dosed me up with some painkillers and offered me some food. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but after not eating all day I knew I could use the calories, and I was pleasantly surprised to be able to eat a plateful of (soft) food and a bowl of custard for dessert without too much discomfort.

The nurse gave me some medication intravenously to reduce the bleeding (I had a couple more infusions of that during the night and the next morning) and then it was time to settle in for the night with Netflix and a jug of ice chips to suck on. And honestly, for the first few hours it wasn’t too bad at all – I was pretty comfortable, stayed hydrated and well entertained by Bojack Horseman. But eventually I started to struggle to stay awake and decided to try and get some sleep, which is where the fun starts. I couldn’t really sleep properly while sitting upright because the bed was a little short for my long legs, so I laid the bed flat and tried to sleep that way, which was a fatal mistake. I snored like mad, my throat got very dry and painful, and by 4am I was frustrated and exhausted. Luckily at that point the nurse stuck her head in and offered me some more pain relief which I gratefully accepted – a good thing she did, as my neighbours on the ward were probably ready to smother me to stop the horrendous snorting noises I was making. But the Endone kicked in so from then on I lay upright, browsed Facebook and dozed until the lights came on. It was only the next day when I read a US hospital’s recommendations to NOT lie down to sleep in the first few days after surgery, I wish I’d read that sooner.

At one of my toilet visits during the night, I risked a look in my mouth. It wasn’t a pretty picture – the back of my throat was black with blood and stitches and I had a bunch of black blood blisters and fun stuff on my tongue as well.