I was given just local anaesthetics for the thoracic drain. The doctor was nice and telling me all what he was doing. However, when I came back to the intensive care, the nurses were more than confused how the system I was given by the doctor, worked. It was quite terrible to lie down there and look at them how they had no idea what to do – it took just a while, but it seemed to me, like hours…
Spending time at the intensive care unit, seeing how the other patients were able to stand up the next day after the operation and most of them went home after a few days made me really depressed. I hated all the “journeys” for X-rays with the whole bed. I thought first that it would be much better if a radiologist came to me with equipment, but I guess that was too reasonable and made sense, so that was something what for sure could not be done. The bed was bumping up and down while my back was singing arias about terrible pain. Then waiting outside the door in the corridor where all the other patients are. All of them were looking at me. I wished I could have been able to hide somewhere because I was covered with a shirt, on the right side of the bed there was the bag with my urine and on the left side there was the system with all the liquid from my lungs. I was glad that the guy who was going with me was able to persuade the lady that the X-ray would be rather better to do on the bed and not moving me again on the hard table. First of all doing it on the bed was less painful and secondly we were told that the liquids in the drainage system should not have been mixed. After a few days the system, which was draining the liquid from my lungs, was changed into passive mode. This means that every two hours a nurse came and pressed the pipe to drain the liquid from my lungs… this was really horrible as I could feel bubbles inside my lungs and my breathing was even more limited..