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A little backstory: When I was in a coma, they had me intubated and on a ventilator. Because I was on the machines for so long, I couldn’t be taken off of any life support machines cold turkey - I had to be weaned off which meant I had to learn to breathe on my own again. When you have machines doing the breathing for you for so long, your lungs get lazy and don’t like to work on their own anymore. So, before waking me up from the coma, they stuck a tracheostomy in. Let me just tell you that the trach was the bane of my existence. I HATED that thing. Here’s why:
First, the process of learning to breathe again was a source of constant panic attacks. They hook the tube on your neck to a machine that pumps out oxygen and then later transition it to room air with the end result being that you breathe without the thing entirely. It’s a process and it’s sorta like training for a marathon. They make you go off the oxygen for a few hours one day, and then longer the next day, and so on. The problem is, I could have a 98% oxygen stat (meaning I was getting plenty of air) but it would feel like I was constantly low on oxygen. Breathing didn’t feel right and it felt like a work out that you just never recover from. I would panic when being taken off the oxygen cause I just never felt like I could breathe. It was a constant battle to push myself farther and stay off the machine longer and I pretty much cried through the entire thing.
Now, the most obvious problem with the trach is that you can’t speak with it. I was on the trach for, I’m guessing here, 5ish weeks. The beginning of this is kinda a blur, but what I remember most is that no one could figure out what I needed cause I couldn’t talk. I would try to write things out, but I was so heavily drugged up that no one could read my hand writing, and I would re-write things over and over again and still no one could understand. As the meds lessened this got better, but there was always a huge communication barrier that I couldn’t seem to overcome. When they trach you, they give you a dry erase board to use to communicate. It has some blank portions on the side to write stuff in, but mostly it’s covered with diagrams of the human body and some boxes you can check like “I need water” “Where am I?” and things like “turn off the lights” and “I’m in pain.” I mostly wrote my own stuff in and rarely used these pre-made boxes of requests. They should really hire me to redesign these boards!
As you can imagine, I would cling to this board like it was a winning lottery ticket. I slept with it - literally. It was my baby. So don’t even get me started on the fucking nurses and how they would MOVE MY DRY ERASE PENS OUT OF REACH AND THEN I COULDNT TALK BUT IN TURN COULDNT EVEN ASK TO GET THE MARKERS BACK BECAUSE I NEEDED A MARKER TO ASK FOR THE MARKERS. YALL!!!! I could bitch about this for days on end but I will spare you.
Lastly, the trach is just plain gross. Like it weirds me out. There’s a hole in your neck with a tube sticking out of it, and every few days they have to replace the tube with a new tube. It made me squeamish. They started me out on a size 8 tube - basically an adult size. And when the docs finally cleared me to learn to speak again, they took the 8 out and switched it to a smaller size 6. When you’re learning to speak again, they give you this plug that you attach to the tube that makes it so the air goes up and out over the tube and through your mouth so that air actually hits your vocal chords to produce sound. Well, for whatever reason, this valve made it so I couldn’t exhale properly. Docs didn’t believe me that something was off - they just kept saying it would take time to get used to. So here I was faced with the decision to either not speak, or be short of breath. *face palm* I eventually somehow talked (erm, wrote?) a doctor into replacing the size 6 with a pediatric size 4. Guess what - little Bex was right! The size 4 did the trick and I was able to speak with the plug in. You’re not allowed to sleep with the plug for some reason, so each night I’d switch back to the dry erase board and pray that some nurse wouldn’t move my markers to the other side of the room.
Here’s where the fun starts. Remember that board with the boxes you could check? Well there were two very sacred boxes that read
Lotion
Massage
YOU BEST BELIEVE I TOOK ADVANTAGE OF THIS.
I would constantly check those two boxes and innocently smile or maybe cry and hope I could convince a CNA to give me a foot rub. After all, I’d been in the hospital for 4 months at this point - I think deserved I massage.
Most nurses would say “oh, no, we don’t do that” to which I say - why the fuck would they give me a board with this pre-typed as a request if it won’t be met???? And then I met Jake. Oh, Jake. My nurse crush. He was this super adorable early 20s, blonde, blue eyed cutie from Wisconsin who, if he wasn’t gay, I would have probably written my digits on that dry erase board. Sweet Jake. He was in nursing school and worked part time on the overnight shifts to make money and somehow I talked this man into giving me nightly foot massages WITH lotion. He was a dreamboat. Some nights he would come in a second time for ANOTHER massage 💆🏻 and he would even add calf and hand massages too. He was my savior. I asked for him nightly and most of the time he wasn’t working and the nurse would just say “he’s so nice, isn’t he?” And then I would try to talk that nurse into lotion/massage and they would never do it. How rude. But Jake - he was my boo and would come visit me even if he wasn’t my CNA. I think my mom even once apologized to him for me forcing him to rub my feet so often. Sorry, not sorry. Jake, if you’re out there, I still think about you often and I miss your soft touch. Come back. 😭😭😭
After 5 weeks the docs FINALLY removed the trach - which is hella gross. I literally had an open hole in my neck for about 3 days until it finally closed up. In order to speak with the tube out, I’d have to cover the hole with a finger. If I coughed, air would shoot out of my neck and blow the bandage off. It was weird and funny and disgusting. I now have a scar that looks like a hickey and I notice people staring at it often. I don’t mind the scar, so long as people don’t think I was some heavy smoker who once had a voice box thingy.
I realize this post was pretty rambly, but basically the moral of the story is
Trachs < Jakes.