Pay for a private hospital room, if you can afford it. My first neighbor was annoyingly chatty and drove away the nurses whom I needed help from and my second neighbor coughed loudly all night long and then had the most obnoxious, caustic, loud-mouthed family that visited him everyday and deprived me of any chance of sleeping during the day (not his fault at all, but still a miserable situation).
Make sure your hospital is well air-conditioned and/or heated. I was unlucky enough to have surgery during an unprecedented heat-wave here in Southern California and unlucky enough to be put in the oldest wing of the hospital with the least amount of air-conditioning. My room was 85 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm not kidding when I say it was like recovering in a sauna. Sometimes I took the ice off my jaws and simply put it on my forehead!
Never have surgery on or near a holiday weekend. I had surgery the Wednesday before Labor Day weekend. Afterwards, I was left in care of the hospital's oral/maxillofacial residents. The problem was, by the time the nurses and residents took me off the pain machine that allowed me to administer myself a dose of Dilaudid (hydromorphone) every six minutes, the holiday weekend was quickly approaching and everyone wants to do anything but hang around a hospital on a holiday weekend. Hence, my pain pump was removed, the Dilaudid wore off pretty quickly, I discovered the next pain medication I'd been prescribed (liquid oxycodone) had no effect on me and not one of the residents was there to change the prescription nor did any one of them answer the nurses' pages for five hours. My second day of recovery from having both my jaws broken and I was forced to endure five hours of intense pain like I've never felt before (and I walked on a broken leg for three days once when I was a teen). During these five hours, one of the nurses noticed I'd been prescribed topical lidocaine and suggested I swish my mouth with it. I did, but it's putrid taste caused me to vomit what little liquids I had in my stomach shortly thereafter. This only exacerbated things and managed to make me feel worse. When asked what the pain I was experiencing felt like on a scale of one to ten, I answered ten to which my nurse looked at her colleague and rolled her eyes. Maybe I was being a baby, but I have never, ever felt anything like that before and it completely knocked me on my ass. Maybe I should have saved that ten on the pain scale to describe what it would feel like if I'm ever stabbed in the chest, but barring that happening, I can't imagine much else feeling like day two of recovery from jaw surgery with no pain medication. When one of the residents did return, I was prescribed such a large dose of morphine that my breathing slowed to dangerous levels and I had to be put on oxygen and monitored. Eventually, I was prescribed a weaker pain medication, hydrocodone a.k.a. Vicodin, but weaker or not, it worked very well.
Catheters hurt. I should know...I had four of them. My first catheter must've been put in sometime during surgical preparations. It was taken out right before I was taken off the pain machine. I was told I had to urinate on my own in six hours or the nurses would have to put in another. The only liquids in my system at that point were from the I.V. and I've never had a very "active" bladder, so six hours went by with no urination and my second catheter, one that was only temporary and used to drain the bladder then removed, was administered that evening. I was given until morning to urinate on my own before a third catheter was required. Morning came and I still hadn't ingested any liquids nor felt the need to urinate. The third catheter was put in early that afternoon. After my pain was in greater control, the third catheter was removed and I was, once again, given another deadline. This deadline passed as well with no urination and since I was looking at impending discharge from the hospital, a fourth catheter that I would be required to go home with was administered. The fourth catheter would hopefully be removed during a urology consult the same day as my one-week post-operative appointment with my surgeon. My appointment date approached and the urology department wouldn't see me because I wasn't a juvenile, so my surgeon offered to remove the catheter himself. Talk about mortifying. I had to drop my trousers in the middle of the university's dental school practice and have my oral/maxillofacial surgeon pull out the catheter with only curtains separating us from tens of patients getting root canals the next cubicle over. Also, make sure the nurse administering or removing your catheter is a seasoned pro. The least painful catheters were done by older nurses who looked like they'd been there for years. The most painful one was done by a pretty, young nurse that, as soon as she started reading the directions on the package, I knew would "butcher" me. When I mentioned to one of my nurses that I dreaded getting one of those additional catheters, she said "Men always have such problems with those. It's not that bad." Yeah, well maybe it's not that bad compared to childbirth, but since men cannot know what that feels like, it's pretty bad. I wanted to reply "How about I jam a swizzel-stick up your pee-hole and see how you like it?"
Make sure the hospital fills your prescriptions before you're discharged. On the fourth day, the hospital didn't get around to discharging me until 8:30pm at which point their pharmacy had closed and they refused to fill my prescriptions. I was actually discharged from the hospital without any pain medications, antibiotics, etc! Luckily I live in a large city and my father was able to find a drugstore with a pharmacy open until 10:00pm.
Once I got home in my air-conditioned apartment with some peace and quiet, pain medication that actually worked and the company of my parents who were dedicated to helping me through this, my recovery really took off. But even then it was much harder and more painful than I had ever anticipated. Maybe I was completely naive about what jaw surgery would entail and what I would have to endure? I remember writing on my dry-erase board those days in the hospital that this surgery was the worst mistake I'd ever made and I would never recommend anyone go through it no matter what. Now, I can't say that is an accurate statement and it was probably the histrionics of someone in pain writing that, but even though I am in little to no pain now and am healing fairly well, I can't say I'd do it all over again. I'll leave that final verdict for when all is said and done and I can judge the final results.
