Quote - I totally feel for you, Acadia. I deal with pain every day in recovery, and I know how bad it can get. That nurse who said it "was too much of a hassle" for her should be fired... or demoted to bedpans. Nursing without any sense of caring for patients has become more the norm than the exception these days, I'm sorry to say. Over-worked, underpaid and totally disregarded in the workforce, the rate of burn-out among nurses is incredibly high.

In our hospital, we have a pain service that does nothing else but monitor patient pain levels and jumps in to relieve acute pain like what you were having.

Why the heck didn't they give you a PCA???

There's no excuse for that nurse's attitude... none at all. I hope you get some sort of patient feedback form from the hospital: if you do, please cite this nurse.  And it can't hurt to send a letter to the ward thanking those who took such good care of you, whilst expressing sorrow for those nurses who find relieving pain of their patients "too much of a hassle"... just a few ideas.

As far as the pain goes: it is terrible pain... it was a big surgery, hun. Take your pain medications regularly to try to stay on top of the pain as much as possible. I so feel for you, Acadia... and wish you much strength and the fastest-possible healing.

God bless... my prayers are with you for a speedy recovery.

I had an epideral.  They had Hydromorphone and Bupivacaine running.  

My surgery was at 9am on Wednesday.  Around 5am on Thursday my blood pressure dropped to 83/49 so they lowered the epidural from 6 ml/hr to 5 ml/hr.

At 8am my pain was 4/10.  Pain service came in and saw me and saw that my blood pressure had improved and told me to have the nurse bump my epidural back up to 6 ml/hr.  So when she came in I told her what pain service said, and she said that she wasn't going to increase it because they increased my anti-inflammatory and wanted to see how that worked first. 

At 3pm  my pain was 6/10, She gave me the Tylenol plain and extra naprosyn  I asked her again to please incrase the rate as pain service had instructed.

She told me that she didn't want to do that because it was too much of a hassle for her to do that. And went on to say that if she increased the rate she would have to do my vital signs every 1/2 hour for an hour, and then every 1 hour for 2 hours and then every 2 hours for 12 hours.

Around 5pm or so she finally increased the rate. By this time my pain was astronomical!

At almost 7pm she came in to get me up for a walk. I hadn't been moving, so it was hard to assess my level of pain.   I tried to get out of bed and managed to get myself partially turned onto my side and partially out of bed, but that was it. The pain was so bad that I couldn't move anymore. I was at the foot of the bed, half in and half out and my body was twisted so that I was partially on my back and side with my head on the side rail on the other side of the bed and my incision line being tugged because I was twisted.

She stood there doing absolutely nothing!  Finally she plugged the pumps back into the wall and walked out of my room.
I laid there for almost 20 minutes in absolute agony and crying. I couldn't reach the call light.  Finally I managed to wiggle around enough to reach the bed buttons and raise the foot of the bed up and lower the head of the bed so that I would wiggle myself down hill to get back into bed.

Once back in bed  I pressed the call light and asked them to page pain service.  The girl at the desk said that she would let my nurse know. About 15 minutes later another nurse came in and told me that my nurse was busy but would come in when she could. I asked her to page pain service and that if they didn't, I would page them myself.

They did page pain service.  They added 10 mg oral morphine to my pain regime, which helped.

The girl that came on night shift that night was super nice! She had to do vital signs on me every 2 hours, but we worked out a system that was easy for her and was minimal interruption for me too.  She just left the cuff on my arm and set it to inflate every 90 minutes (the maximum that machine would allow). The machine would get the reading, she would write it down and I didn't wake up once during the entire thing.  THAT! Was what was too much of a hassel for the other nurse to do!!

When pain service came around the next day (Friday) I told them what happened. They went and talked to the manager and she came to talk to me.

I would never dream of holding anyone's pain medication from them, especially claiming "too much of a hassel" as the reason!     With the exception of that situation, I  didn't have any issues with her standard of care, and I told the manager that.

 

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi