The Great Outdoors

I am a camper from way back. My dad's family lived in Pittsburgh, Pa and every summer, for the first two weeks in July, my parents packed up us kids and the station wagon and we headed east to visit them. As close as I can figure we added camping to the summer routine when I was somewhere between 5 and 7 years old. Papa, on the other hand, once owned a tent when he was in his late teens... that was the extent of his camping knowledge and experience. That changed when we got married.

One reason my parents camped was because it was a way to go places and see things less expensively and with anywhere between 3 and 5 kids it was necessary to do things cheaply. Papa and I camped for the same reason but more importantly, because I loved it and soon so did he. We like having campfires at night and cooking over a fire and the smell of bacon frying and fresh coffee brewing in the morning. Pit toilets and mosquitoes... not so much but hey!.. ya gotta take some bad to get to the good.

The kids and I were the ones who always got ready for our trips and the ones who did the majority of the work while camping. For days in advance I would sort and wash and pack all the necessary items and then on the big day I would direct the packing of the camper and van while Papa slept in as long as possible. When everything was ready I would wake him up... all he had to do was hitch up the camper, get in the van and go along for the ride. Of course he would have to screw up the smoothness of my routine by having to triple check the oil and the tire pressure and oh, did I remember to pack the camping axe this time?

Our first trip post-surgery was very different. For one thing, just prior to having the surgery we had gotten the oil changed and had new tires put on the van so Papa didn't have those things to worry about. Daughter and son-in-law and oldest grand daughters helped schlepp all the gear to the camper and van and I packed. All Papa had to do was supervise son-in-law in the hitching-up of the camper, a process I find complicated with the big hitch on our current camper/van.

The first time I saw his incision I was astonished. That sucker spanned his entire abdomen (a considerable expanse) and looked like an up-side-down smiley face. It had to be a good fifteen inches long. He also had three puncture wounds, one from the feeding tube and two from the wound drains. His incision was stapled shut and his belly had a new terrain, bumpy and lumpy where it had once been bump-free... all thanks to the new configuration of the organs within. Before he left the hospital the staples were removed and steri-strips were placed over the incision, but he went home with the drains and feeding tube. It was my job to clean the wound, put a clean dressing on it at least daily, flush the feeding tube daily (the feedings were stopped when he was in the hospital. They left the tube in for a while just in case he could not eat normally and had to resume the feedings, the flushing was to keep the tube patent), empty the wound drains and measure the drainage when they got full, or daily, which ever came first. For those that may not know, wound drains like Papa's are bulb-shaped and connected to a long tube. The tube goes through a puncture wound into the surgical area; it flattens out to a tube with holes in it. You gently squeeze the bulb and it pulls blood and excess fluid out of the wound area, into the bulb of the drain, which you then empty.

Then a week or so before the trip, Papa was turning over in bed and one end of his incision split open, about two inches long. He bled all over the bed, old blackish blood from a huge hematoma that was inside on the right end of the incision. I cleaned and dressed the wound and of course, he refused to go to the doctor or the hospital to have it checked. He maintained that he was not going to let them re-stitch it anyway, or have another surgery, and his appendix incision had healed just fine and it had been a lot bigger so just deal with it wife! A couple days later we had his first post-op surgeon visit and the doctor didn't even blink an eye at the open area. He gave his blessing to the camping trip but even if he hadn't, Papa would still have insisted on going.

Soooo... surgery was June 17th, Papa came home June 25th and we went camping July 8th. We went to one of our favorite campgrounds, two hours from home so that we could get back home quickly if need be. Right from the start he felt like crap. He was weak and nauseated. He usually liked the camper bed but he couldn't get comfortable. He ate too much food inspite of the nausea. Now, my husband in times past, could put away a large amount of food but no more. I told him he had weight-loss surgery without even wanting it. That first night he was so very sick. My daughter and I could hear his stomach making noise from a good distance away. He had that sickie grey color again. He tossed and turned and moaned and groaned. I was waiting to hear him start vomiting... something he had not done at all since the surgery. There was nothing I could do for him, no medications that he had not already taken. And my one year old grand daughter cried at night, loud, piercing, make-grandma-feel terrible cries that we could hear 50 yards away, making grandpa worry and lose sleep.

The next day I told him I wanted to go home and we argued a bit but he refused. He did not say it, but I know he felt that he was near death and wanted this time with as many of our kids as we could manage to have with us and our sons and their families were on the way to the campground. So we both endured. He sometimes refused to take his medications and also would not let me look at his wound. It was bleeding a little and I think he didn't want to give me any more ammunition about going home. His old dressings looked terrible and nasty.

The rest of the weekend was better for him, thank God. We pampered him as much as possible, made him his favorite foods, made sure he ate in small amounts, made sure he got lots of naps, made sure he didn't wait too long to take pain meds. It was grueling. It was the worst camping trip I ever went on. By the time we got home I decided I wanted to sell the camper