My angel nurse was pretty good company through that long first night that I was stuck in the hospital. I would have slept except she wouldn’t let me so instead I surfed the internet on my phone, watched endless informercials since I couldn’t turn the stupid TV off (and I felt bad asking her to do it), and had several conversations with her, one of which was debating the merits of Tempurpedic (I’m a fan and was really missing mine that night). She finally dragged me out of bed around 5AM after we negotiated an agreement that I would get up if she called my doctor’s resident and got her to a)write my discharge orders and b)remove the catheter.
Resident doctor came right away and agreed that I could leave soon but the order somehow didn’t get communicated to day nurse, henceforth to be known as Satan Nurse or SN for short.
SN clearly thought very highly of herself and her importance. I did not and she failed to understand that I was irritable and in pain since her method of administering pain medication was primarily to ignore me when I pushed the nurse call button. Seriously, she told me once that she was too busy. SN also decided to tell me that I would not be leaving until much later in the afternoon. Ummm, no. She sorted that out rather quickly after I set her straight. Convenient being on drugs, by the way. You can get by with a lot of bad behavior by using that excuse.
She did win one battle by making me attempt to eat breakfast although I did request a preemptive shot of anti-nausea meds first. The breakfast itself was rather horrid and I tried to talk J into eating some of it when he got there. He opted out. So did I.
I won the next skirmish by refusing to have my IV out until I got one last dose of the good stuff medicine before leaving and getting into a bouncy car for the ride home.
To make a long story short (I know – y’all are sighing with relief): J busted me out of there, brought me home,managed to get me upstairs, and put me to bed. At some point he went and filled all my prescriptions and proceeded to keep me drugged up and sleeping. Good thing J planned the entire week off to play nursemaid to me, Mr. Mom to Ava, and zookeeper to the menagerie.
Although I am a very easy sick person to take care of, if I do say so myself. Just toss me some crackers and grape kool-aid in every so often and I’m happy.
The pain level at home wasn’t too bad but narcotics were definitely needed for several days. I also developed an immediate and intense longing for a full length body pillow and J kindly made an emergency trip out to procure one.
And Ava’s reaction to all this? Well, that’s a whole ‘nother post.
Y’all know the drill. No food or water after midnight (I ate a gigantic peanut butter sandwich at 11:55PM and downed a couple of big glasses of water), no lotion or makeup, remove all nail polish and piercings, and so on. All regulations were complied with, bags were packed, and we were on our way by 10AM to drop Ava at daycare in order to be at the hospital by 10:30AM for a surgery time of 1PM. Ava was totally feeling the stress vibe and I was on the verge of tears so J ripped her out of my arms (almost literally) and took her in – with her little arms outstretched and reaching for me while I got all weepy in the car. We made it to the hospital just barely on time only to discover that I’d left my ID at home. Fortunately the check in nurse didn’t care since they had one on file and she said nobody in their right mind would try to scam their way in to undergo major surgery anyway.
We waited for ages in the waiting room and again in the tiny cubby they stuff you into to wait to be carted back to surgery. Apparently they weren’t too worried about HIPAA violations back there ’cause I could tell you far too much information about the gentleman who was in the cubby next to mine – name, age, diagnosis, blood type, surgery, address, and more. I was there so long that J was getting ready to find someone since they’d obviously forgotten about me when my anesthesiologist showed up cracking bad jokes (something about him never having anyone wake up dead and then chortling like he didn’t tell this same joke to every single patient he has) and with an explanation that the surgery prior to mine ran longer than expected. I got the ‘these are all the things that can go wrong’ speech from both him and my surgeon but by this time I’m contemplating gnawing on the IV bag for nourishment since I was now at 14 hours and counting from last food or liquid consumption and I would have agreed to anything so they would stop talking and get started. Bad joke doc gave me drugs (which made me appreciate his jokes much more) and I happily waved J off to go nosh on some hospital food while I went under the fancy robot knives – albeit with an understanding that if the endo was too bad then they may have to do a regular abdominal hysterectomy. The surgery was estimated to take about 3 hours.
He did it in 2. Everything went so much smoother than he’d anticipated and he said I was a perfect candidate for the DaVinci assisted since it allowed him a magnified view of all the endo that was in there. He removed a large band of scar tissue, a number of adhesions (some of which had stuck my colon to the abdominal wall), and excised a ton of endo after he’d removed the uterus – most of this was found in the harder to reach places near the bladder which makes sense considering I’d just had surgery in April. He also removed my problematic right ovary but left the other one since it appeared to be unaffected and he knew how strongly I felt about keeping it if there was any way possible in order to avoid hormone replacement therapy. Oh yeah, and the cervix too. I couldn’t see any reason to keep it and after my (unfounded) scare last year with a questionable pap test I had no qualms about letting that go, too. Recovery room was a breeze once they brought me some ice chips and a couple of those super warm blankets and I was carted off to my room soon thereafter.
I had a private room (thank heavens) and I think J was already in there when I arrived. Or maybe not. What can I say? I was higher than a kite so my recall is a little foggy. I do know he had to track down my bag o’ stuff that had gone missing and he had the foresight to ferret me out some ginger ale before heading out to pick Ava up and take her to our friends’ house for the evening so he could come back and make sure I was good and settled for the night. Ava did fine with our friends – making a new best friend of their teenage daughter. Even though Ava is in daycare for about 6 hours a day we almost never leave her any other time so I was worried about this. For no reason, apparently.
J came back (with crackers – YAY!) and hung out for a couple of hours, most of which we spent celebrating the fact that I was alive by trying to figure out how to turn off the TV with the provided remote. I was convinced it was me (that drug thing again) but neither he or the evening nurse could make it work either. No matter, I had my iPhone with music, books, and J brought my netbook in case I felt like blog reading and commenting under the influence – which I would have except they had a net nanny type of program on their wireless and I couldn’t access anything I normally read…including my own. Who knew I was classed under objectionable content?
Other than the typical annoyances associated with a hospital stay (you know, where the nurse comes into the room 5 seconds after you finally fall asleep to wake you for a blood pressure or something) it wasn’t a bad experience. The (very good) pain medication was free flowing so pain never went above a 6-7 on the pain scale and my night nurse was an absolute angel except when she let my IV bag run dry and the alarms went off scaring the heck out of me. Seriously – an angel. It amazes me how much nurses do, all the while maintaining a pleasant and positive attitude, with so little recognition.
Still more later…
Since my surgery was moved up unexpectedly it meant that a whole lot of stuff needed to be adjusted. I was going to be out of work several days earlier than I’d planned, J needed to reschedule his time-off, and most importantly we needed to find someone to watch Ava on Monday evening since my surgery was now scheduled for later in the day than originally planned. I’m a plan-far-in-advance sort of person so I found all of these changes incredibly stressful, not to mention that my house (or at least the room I was going to be confined to) needed to be spotless so as not to drive me batty, I needed to shop for items needed for the hospital and immediate recovery and, oh by the way, my in-laws would be coming for a short visit (and dinner) on Saturday night, too. Due to that out of work earlier than planned thing I worked until late in the evening on Friday night cutting into my prep time even more.
Most importantly, thanks to a somewhat devious friend who shall not be named, I’d recently gotten hooked on a vampire series clearly designed for an angsty pre-teen and/or a middle aged female audience, watched the first movie, and just HAD to see the second in the series before I was down and out (and therefore unable to get out at all for a while). Thankfully my in-laws are understanding sorts and didn’t mind much when I bailed out on them after dinner on Saturday night and headed out to meet said friend at the movies to drool over were-teenagers with abs to die for. Of course, it didn’t hurt that my absence meant the grandparents had their son and granddaughter all to themselves for a couple of hours (which is a treat, I’m sure, since it doesn’t happen all that often).
Movie Funny #1: I think there were 2 men in the audience that night. One of them was clearly on a date and the other was the long (and loud) suffering spouse who wasn’t about to let his wife forget that the next time was his turn to pick the movie. Movie Funny #2: Hearing all the middle aged women audibly gasp when the clearly jailbait actor takes his shirt off for the first time and then laugh self consciously when they realized what they were doing. Pathetic Movie Fact #1: It’s the first movie I’ve seen in the theater since well before Ava came home over 2 years ago.
So many, many things to do and not enough time.
Not to mention that it’s about this time that the doubts set in. Not about the surgery itself but about the fact that I am now nearly convinced that I will die in surgery and Ava will be left motherless again. (I get like this when I fly, too – every single time.) At this very late date I decide we need a new will (sorry – too late to do that) and want to discuss J’s next wife (and future mother to my child) with him. He, understandably, thinks that I am nuts and refuses to talk about it which makes me threaten to cancel the surgery completely (except by now I’m really looking forward to the 6 weeks off from work).
Oh yeah, and I had to go to the hospital over the weekend so they could rush the labwork through. Once I found my way to some closet they’re renovating but are currently using as a blood-sucking room the hospital vampire swooped in, drained half my blood, and then slapped a hospital ID bracelet on me before telling me I couldn’t take it off until my surgery on Monday. WTH? Now I’m stuck with a hospital bracelet with about 40 tabs noting my blood type and I’m heading out for a night out with my friend – not that we’re all that exciting or looking for action or anything but a hospital ID was not my accessory of choice.
Good times were had by all, despite my stress and paranoia. My mother-in-law came bearing much frozen food in the hopes that J and Ava would not be forced to subsist on canned pasta sauce (the sacrilege), she cooked us dinner (yum, sausages from NY) when she arrived, I got a night out with a cool friend (sans kids) AND I got accosted and robbed by Barnes and Noble on the way out of the mall. (That’s what I told J, anyway, to account for the lighter wallet and large bag of books I brought home.)
More Later…
Let’s see – over the last 10 years or so, I’ve had laparoscopic surgery 4 (I think) times for removal of endometriosis, adhesions, and scar tissue. I’ve also been on birth control pills and other hormonal treatments for most of my adult years – pretty much every type of BCPs along with a couple rounds of Lupron (drug of Satan, I swear) and Synarel (which was wonderful). The purpose of both Lupron and Synarel is to put your body into a chemically induced state of menopause in order to starve the endo and (theoretically) cause it to die off since it’s estrogen that feeds it. The BCPs level your hormones out so while it won’t cure the endo it can at least (theoretically) suppress the growth. The surgeries are, of course, to remove the endo and fix any other problems it has caused.
The funny thing about endo is that it’s not very predictable. Some people can have the worst stage of the disease with no symptoms at all and others can experience the worst pain with only a slight case of endometriosis. It’s graded by stages, with I being the least invasive and IV being the worst. I’ve watched mine progress through the years from a Stage I (diagnosed around age 25) to the worst case of Stage IV that my surgeon from last year had ever seen. Fortunately I’ve been one of the lucky ones for most of my life and have not been sidelined with any major pain or other issues normally associated with endometriosis. That is, until the last couple of years. But honestly, even then it hasn’t been so bad. Mainly a low grade chronic pain that was easily treated with the magical Motrin so often prescribed by the military docs…except it was starting to get to the point that the Motrin wasn’t working so well any longer and the bigger guns had to be pulled out.
At my last lap in April ‘09 the military doctor I’d been seeing for eons (3 surgeries) finally mentioned the “h” word: Hysterectomy. Now you need to understand that I’d previously mentioned, even requested, a hysterectomy in the past but had been shot down over and over again due to the fact that I was so young, didn’t have children, blah blah blah. I found this insulting because they (several military docs) apparently believed that I wasn’t intelligent enough to know my own mind or have any real say in how this disease affecting MY body should be treated. Not to mention that I’ve known my whole life (well, since I was a teenager) that my kid(s) were in China and I never planned nor expected to have biological children. But I wasn’t ready last year because Ava had just turned 2 and I couldn’t fathom how I could handle her while recovering from that surgery. J was traveling quite a bit around this time and it just wasn’t do-able so I shelved the thought for a while.
Because the endo was sooooo bad the last time the doc put me on Synarel, which is a GnRH-a therapy, after surgery. This put me full square into menopause within a week of starting it…and I LOVED it. Very few migraines (compared to my normal 4-6 a month) and it was my first taste of NO pain, which made me realize how obnoxious that low grade, chronic pain really was. Unfortunately you can only take Synarel for 3-6 months as the side effects (bone loss and increased cholesterol amongst others) can be pretty nasty. But that pain free part? Sign me up because I was hooked. I finished the Synarel in August and the endo with associated pain was already coming back by the end of October.
But I was still pretty worried about the surgery itself and, more importantly, the recovery. Remember that toddler and all? So I needed to find the best and easiest way to do this which I already knew wouldn’t involve the military if I could help it. Since I’ve always maintained separate civilian health insurance I did some research, found the best surgeon in the area who utilized the DaVinci robotic assisted method, and made a phone call.
Except I couldn’t even get an appointment with him for nearly a year. I pled my case to the receptionist, who is also a fellow endo sufferer, and she back-doored me into a NP appointment who then referred me to the surgeon, scoring me an appointment in early December. And what a breath of fresh air he was.
I took all my records and formulated my arguments only to discover that I didn’t even really need them. He reviewed my records, did a physical exam, listened to me plead my case, and then agreed that a hysterectomy was certainly indicated based on all that he’d seen and heard from me. I told him that I wanted to do robotic assisted if at all possible (at this point his eyes lit up like a Christmas tree – apparently this is pretty cool to him when he gets to do it) and he simply asked me when I wanted to have it done.
“Mid-January, please.” I replied.
And that was it. I signed the paperwork, agreed on a January 14th surgery date, got my pre-op instructions, and pretty much went on my merry way. This made me happy since I could deal with the holiday stuff, celebrate our anniversary, and then go under the knife (or whatever the robot guy uses – I had a visual of laser beams shooting from his eyes but I’m pretty sure that’s just me being all sci-fi weird) before taking a few weeks to recover. The doc insists you commit to 4-6 weeks off, by the way, but I was convinced I’d be a superstar and would be totally recovered in 2 weeks or so.
All was planned well in advance: J was taking time off, the surgery was scheduled for early AM so we wouldn’t have to worry about finding someone to watch Ava, etc. Extra pajamas were purchased (in a larger size to account for the swelling) and everything was set…until I got the unexpected phone call that surgery was moved up to January 11th instead.
To be continued…
Please note that I’m back dating posts so this isn’t happening now. I’m all better (mostly) and am just now fleshing out my drafts and actually getting them posted. I blame Disney. I haven’t been blogging in the present since we got behind on that trip. Maybe someday I’ll be caught up.
Clearly she has none.
When I asked her what on earth she was doing, she replied “Cleaning my toes, Mama.”
What could I do but laugh? She answered my question, didn’t she?
And then we had a chat about the appropriateness of putting our feet on the table…especially while eating. So far the message seems to have stuck, thank goodness.