Was anyone else really afraid when the ICU nurses came to roll them from side to side in order to wash them?

[patchworker]

I've just found something I wrote when I first came home from hospital . My daughter wanted me to write down ever thing I remembered.

There's pain everywhere. One big pain and a constellation of smaller ones, all different. Sharp ones, stingy ones, dull aches.

. My ear is folded forward and it stings

. My bad knee aches

. My ribs down my right side are one big ache, with several sharply painful spots.

But my belly is one big screaming, roaring pain.

I think of them as different colours, yellow, purple, red.

I can't speak, and I haven't enough strength to try to explain to the nurse. Besides, if I attract her attention she might come and roll me, and I'd rather have the pain than that.

[Mike-N]

Except for the dreams and nightmares I don't remember anything about my stay in ICU, but what I thought was Nightmare turns out to be true. In the nightmare a nurse was trying to strip my hospital gown off so that she and a male nurse could cut me open to take my organs, but apparently the nurse told my wife (jokingly) that I was the first man who had fought her off when she was trying to give them a bed bath, she said that I fought so hard to hang onto it that she had to call the male nurse over to help her. Boy did I miss out there LOL.

Seriously though I cannot understand why they needed to struggle with me so much, surely one of them should have known the sort of horror my mind COULD be going through.

I am sorry to hear the pain you felt. I was lucky and passed out, so I never felt any heart attack pain, or the terror I would have felt from the pulmonary oedema feeling up my lungs and not being able to take a breath.

Take care

Mike

[Amy1989hope]

Hi there,

I was absolutely terrified when the ICU nurses rolled me, I used to feel nothing but pain and felt like I couldn't breathe when they rolled me. Due to the severity of my illness and being unable to move myself I had to be rolled regularly and it is really scary. It was worst at night when I would wake up with 3+ nurses around me getting ready to roll me to reduce the breakdown of my skin. It's completely understandable why you were scared and like you I had stomach pain so when they roll and your on your side the pain was just horrible and felt like it was suffocating me.

Hope it helps knowing your not on your own.

Amy