I have realized something about myself. I can get through anything if I am thoroughly pissed off. Being pissed off keeps me focused on playing through and doesn’t let me get all emotional and weepy. Thus surgery day didn’t scare me as much as it annoyed the living hell out of me. This worked to my advantage fortunately and also provides good fodder for a blog.
Let me back up to the Friday before surgery to give you the whole picture. One of the things that my breast specialist, Dr. Golesorkhi, suggested was to do a pre-op class so that I would understand what the process would be on surgery day. This seemed like a reasonable idea, so the Friday before, Tracy and I went over to Virginia Hospital Center to do it. There we met Nurse J. I will lead with the assumption that Nurse J. is probably a well-intentioned person (ok, I am only saying that because Martha Jo keeps telling me that she was – I am not that nice really). Nurse J. starts with the tour of where I need to go the morning of, tells me about the pager system and monitor my friends will have for updates, how the doctors come out for updates, and that I will end up on the 5th floor - useful information that took about 15 minutes and most of which she had already basically told me on the phone when I set up this so-called class.
And yet, Nurse J. continued…. She took us to her office which she happened to have locked herself out of so we had to wait for the maintenance person to come and let her back in, but she started briefing us in the hall way. Now by “briefing” what I really mean is babbling. This was possibly one of the most disjointed conversations that I have ever had. But fine. I figured she was just channeling nerves because she had locked herself out of her office. At last we get inside and she tells me she has an information packet for me. By "packet”, what I really mean is that she is going to pull random pieces of paper out of various places in her office, thus making us quickly realize that the babbling is also not a temporary thing. This is the most disorganized person on the planet in thought and deed. I got a headache trying to follow the tangents she went off on, more than half of which were just not really necessary for pre-op education and the rest were things I already knew from my very thorough doctors’ offices or having gone through this with my own mother.
Before you say it, yes I know I can be a little OCD about work but SERIOUSLY if your whole job is to provide information to people on a specific surgical procedure, wouldn’t your talk be pretty standard and your packets be all put together in an order that makes sense?
This ridiculous talk was heading toward an hour and a half when Tracy noted that we really needed to get back to work and I quickly snatched up all the papers so we could get out of there. Yet Nurse J had to walk us to the elevator too, babbling all the way. Her parting comment was that she would come to see me on surgery day too -I thought my head would explode.
This led Tracy to email Martha Jo and Laurie, who would be with me on surgery day, that they really need to keep Nurse J away from me or I might hurt someone – probably her. Seriously – the woman was on the very end of my very last nerve and this I did not need.
Of course, I was trying not to think too hard about what was really going to be done to me in surgery, so what stayed in my mind – annoying Nurse J and my very strong desire to never have to see her again. I would not be so lucky.
D Day, or should I say Double D Day, came on March 9. I was actually far more calm than I expected to be in large part because Martha Jo was with me and I felt like everything was “in order” (more on that topic in another blog), and Laurie and Pastor Jan were coming to be with us as well. I will also note here that initially Virginia Hospital Center does a great job of keeping your peeps in the loop – they get a pager so they can wander the halls of the hospital while they wait and get paged when something new happens. There is also a TV-screen that shows where a patient is in the process and when the doctors might be out to talk. Initially. More on that later.
We got there right on time and Pastor Jan joined us a few minutes later. It was so great to have her there and for her to pray with us. Laurie unfortunately went to the wrong hospital first (classic brain fart) but did get there in time to help keep me occupied through pre-op.
Two of the most annoying things about pre-op: They make you wipe yourself down with these wipes called “sage wipes” that are supposed to help keep infection away but they leave this odd residue that makes you hot. Then you have to put on what amounts to a plastic gown that is supposed to help keep your body temp where it should do and supposedly has a “cool” setting too. Add that to the fact that I had not had a drop to drink since the night before, I started feeling like I was going to catch fire. At my age, you don’t need help to get a damn hot flash going. I was pretty miserable when I got the next bit of news.
Some person was scheduled for surgery in the same operating room I was to be in and then wasn’t sure they wanted to go through with it. This person had to be talked into apparent over a period of two and a half hours. Ok, I can be sensitive and understand how scary having surgery is – hell I didn’t want to have it either. But here is what really pisses me off – this is not the first time that the person was scheduled and didn’t want to do it and apparently the time before did not actually go through with it. Here is my question: what MORON allowed this person to be scheduled before anyone else and screw up the whole schedule????
We had gotten there at 10 and surgery was supposed to be at noon – and now it was going to be after 2?? Yikes! But I was willing to suck it up and power through (using pissed off power) because to me, rescheduling was not an option – I was there and ready, I wanted to get this over with. Enter Nurse J. As promised, she showed up to see what I needed her help with – which unless she could remove the person who was in my operating room was NOTHING. Still she babbled and honestly I have no idea about what. I was not mean to her, but she didn’t pick up on any of my queues like “No thanks, I’m good.” And “yes all set in here.” Laurie, bless her heart, started physically blocking Nurse J from coming in to the room further and was blocking her from getting closer to me (smacking range!) and even Martha picked up on Laurie’s physical queues, but Nurse J, nope kept talking kept and just stood there until finally another nurse came in to let us know the doctor were going to be coming in. In parting, she said she would come and see me the following day – WHY? I didn’t need her!! WHY couldn’t she just get out of my face? We had no idea. When she finally left, we busted up laughing – oh and had to explain to Pastor Jan why! (She takes grumpiness and silliness very well!)
Of course the whole time this is going on, I was overheating more and more. We figured that it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission, so we took matters into our own hands and changed me out of the saran wrap gown to a cotton one. There was no way I would have made it two and a half more hours than planned wearing that wretched thing. Again, I was really lucky to have wonderful conversation with my friends and a lot more laughing than most people would have in the same situation.
This is a bit out of sequence but I thought I would just tell you about each doctor and their role.
Dr. Golesorkhi is my breast specialist and would be my attending physician and also do the removal of my right breast. (She is the doctor who did my biopsy, and laid out the plan for us to kick cancer’s ass.) It was very sweet; she brought me a pillow that her mother makes for all her patients to put under their arm when it hurts (because of the lymph node removal etc). She came in to go over what the procedure entailed, and to put a mark on the right breast so they wouldn’t remove the wrong one.
Dr. Mesbahi is my reconstructive surgeon. While Golesorkhi removed the right breast, he would do a lift and reduction on the left one. When she was done on the right, he would insert a tissue expander to help keep that side ready for the new breast I will get later. (More on the whole topic of reconstruction in another blog). He came in to draw all over my left breast with a marker and honestly it looked like hieroglyphics (and yes they occasionally have to “erase” with an alcohol wipe – for some reason I found that terribly funny. He also drew a number of nurses to the area near my room because he is not hard on the eyes.
Dr. Banks was the anesthesiologist who was very warm and witty, and has really calming eyes. I was impressed that he put the IV in my arm himself rather than have a nurse do it. Of all of the things to worry about, I was most concerned about whether or not I would wake up, but I was immediately confident in him. He thought we were all kind of funny.
All of them expressed a lot frustration about the operating room situation, but there was nothing they could do about it. So we just waited. There was a flurry of nurses in and out checking on nothing, and almost all of them commenting that I had pretty toes. So glad I got them done the Monday before! I don’t know why that sticks in my head but it does. When they asked how I was doing, I would say fine. After they walked out, I would tell Martha Jo, Jan and Laurie that I am fine as long as Nurse J doesn’t get in my face again. Really I dreaded this woman more than the surgery.
Laurie had to get to work, and it was hard to say goodbye to her. When surgery FINALLY arrived at 2:30 pm, Jan said a blessing as she hugged me, and I started crying when I hugged Martha. It wasn’t until then that I really felt scared and started to cry. The roll down the hallway to the surgery seemed to take even longer than the four and a half hours that we sat around waiting and being annoyed. The last thing I remember rwas getting to the Operating Room , Dr. Banks holding my hand and telling me he was sorry that I would remember actually seeing the operating room but that he promised I wouldn’t remember anything else and thankfully he was right.
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