[disclaimer: This was Tammy's experience and is not a typical experience for a cochlear implantee.]
I was at work when Tammy messaged me from Tufts New England Medical Center around 1:45pm on July 14, 2005. She was on the gurney receiving an IV in her arm before being wheeled into the operating room! She told me that I could message her husband in a few hours. She was originally scheduled to have surgery at 6am that morning but delays meant a later time frame and a very long wait for Tammy and her husband. The last thing I said to her was "try not to think about your butt showing" (through a traditional hospital gown known as a Johnny) but she did not get the message as they had taken her into the operating room. Her husband saw the message and thought it was funny.
I was unable to make contact with Tammy again until a couple of days later. What was supposed to be a two to two and and a half hour operation stretched out into a six and a half hour operation because of complications that made it an "extremely difficult surgery" according to the surgeon.
Operating Table
Tammy's pulse changed TWICE after the operation which scared her husband as he sat by her bedside for hours. In her words, during the operation some things "went bad." She did make it through surgery however and was wheeled into PACU recovery once the surgery was over. She was never wheeled to a regular hospital room.While the surgery was happening, Tammy remembers being in a dreamlike state, reliving her childhood years and much of her life. Her husband was allowed in the operating room with her until she was put to sleep.
Waking Up
Tammy drifted in and out of consciousness for the first 12 hours following surgery. She remembers having two nurses by her bedside. Her husband stayed until 2am in the morning after surgery helping the nurse to look after her intently. When Tammy first woke, an intense " loud terrible roaring" was in her right ear. She could not hear a thing and was told she had no hearing left. The roaring and pain were so bad she had to be given powerful drugs to help her cope. She threw up several times and remembers feeling very disoriented. Tammy was given morphine and percocet narcotics to help her get through the first vital hours following surgery. Every time she woke up, the painful roaring came back. The surgeon said it was normal to experience.When she awoke around 11:30pm the first time, she discovered she was hooked to numerous monitors and had many tubes going to machines. A tube was in her throat (removed), an IV in the hand administering powerful drugs, and there were heart, pulse, and temperature monitors. Her neck, face, ear, and part of her head were all very swollen. Half of her face was yellow and bruised (jaundice). The jaundice took two or three days to completely go away and she was sensitive to light. Her head was heavily bandaged, and covered with a small helmet-like shield covering the incision and ear. Blood like "bloody fingerprints" was visible here and there on the bandage. She tried to look in a mirror the next morning but was dizzy. She could not walk without help until her eighth day home because of the dizziness.
In Pain
The right side of her body ached. Her neck, jawline and right shoulder were stiff, and she could not laugh at one of my cyber-jokes because she had a sore throat that hurt so much that even eating was hard to do. She tried to suck ice chips around 2 am but it hurt to put them in her mouth. Her mouth was numb and she experienced loss of taste and it took three tries before she could eat ice chips. The nurse kept trying to get her to suck on orange ice but she pushed away everything given to her because of nausea.Not only that, she was still in a lot of pain, and on many different drugs to control pain and post-infection -- a serious consideration for this kind of surgery. Tammy had known there would be some pain and expected many of the side effects, but as she put it, she "didn't think compared to child birth it would blow having a baby [without pain medication] out of the water."
From her research, Tammy learned people did not always experience the same side effects or nearly as much pain. Given that she was not just having a cochlear implant surgery but also a canal wall up and semi-radical mastoidectomy with removal of previous infectious areas surrounding the middle ear, and cochlea and bone structure, it was far from a normal CI surgery.
Recovery Begins
They stayed overnight at the hospital and next afternoon returned to the hotel. It was uncomfortable just moving around. Many cochlear implant patients are said to be released within 24 hours post surgery because of insurance demands to do so. Tammy was no exception even though her surgeon and nurse both felt she should have stayed longer. She still felt disoriented. They decided to stay another night in the hotel before the long three hour journey home.
Three days after surgery, Tammy and her husband drove home. A few days later, they were able to remove the plastic helmet.
