{"id":29917,"date":"2010-11-11T06:21:09","date_gmt":"2010-11-11T11:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=29917"},"modified":"2010-11-11T06:39:00","modified_gmt":"2010-11-11T11:39:00","slug":"surgery-post-mortem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=29917","title":{"rendered":"Surgery Post-Mortem"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Anesthesia was such a breeze I don’t even remember it. I appreciate everyone sharing their experiences, I really do! I don’t remember counting-down, or anything like that. I remember being placed on the table under the shiny lights, with about 10 people hovering around me wearing masks, and looking upside-down at the kindly anesthesiologist and then, in a flash, it was two hours later and someone was talking to me and I was trying to respond. I actually would like an anesthesiologist on call for those nights when I can’t sleep. It was awesome. <\/p>\n

There was a delay in getting into the OR. A couple of surgeries ran over. So I had to wait, lying in bed, in this holding area with a bunch of other sick people. My mother sat with me. There was one man across from me and I am a bit haunted by him today. My mother and I have talked about him, we both remember him. Most people there had family members hanging out with them. This guy spoke no English, I think they were trying to find a translator on short notice, he had had a stroke (and there were a host of other problems), and he couldn’t speak, and nobody could find his family members. Perhaps it was a matter of translating. They were asking him questions, like, what year is it, what is your name … and the questions upset him. He was clearly very frightened. And he had no one there. I have thought about that man a lot since. <\/p>\n

Every doctor\/nurse\/technician I met was very nice. I had no idea what was going on half the time, but they all treated me with kindness and respect, which makes a huge difference. The dude who was head of Anesthesiology came and interviewed me, and he had a thick German accent, which originally made him sound cold and clinical, but then I realized how kind he was. He asked me when I had last eaten. I said “Last night.” (It was, by that point, 2 hours past my original surgery appointment, due to the back-up. I was ravenous.) He murmured, looking at his chart, “Poor girl.” Kindness like that matters a lot when you are wearing a gown, a bracelet with your name on it, a little net cap around your head and attached to an IV. <\/p>\n

There was one nurse who I flagged down, concerned because I had contacts in, and I was supposed to take them out before surgery. But I had no saline solution, or containers, and I hadn’t brought my glasses. Nobody had told me. She totally got the situation, and went and got me two plastic containers, and she even put a label on one of them: “RIGHT”, and also filled up the containers with a saline solution. She said to me, “If you’re as blind as I am, you’ll want to wait til the last minute to take them out. Your mother can take the containers.” She was a contact-lens wearer, OBVIOUSLY. Not only sympathetic to the situation, but knowing beforehand what I would need. I am sure it happens a lot (people having contacts in and needing to put them somewhere), but her thoughtful labeling of one of the containers as RIGHT was strangely comforting. <\/p>\n

My doctor kept coming to visit me in what I thought of as the “holding pen”, telling me it wouldn’t be long now, maybe 20 more minutes, 40 more minutes. <\/p>\n

And then once it was time, everything happened very quickly. I was rolled off into the night, given some sort of sedative to chill me out. I was rolled into this scary room, blasted with light, and moved onto the main table. I then promptly began to float above myself in an alarming yet also awesome manner, rising up in a disembodied fashion to meet the smiling face of the anesthesiologist, and then suddenly it was 2 hours later. <\/p>\n

I’ve been pretty tired since Tuesday, but it looks like I am recovering well. And the situation that made me go get surgery in the first place appears to have vanished completely (knock on wood), so we’ll see what the next month brings, but it’s already a relief to not have to be dealing with that … situation<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Thank God my mother was here to ferry me home. I felt fine, ready to eat a three-course meal and guzzle two cans of seltzer, but I was quite tired and crampy. They gave me some Tylenol with Codeine which knocked out the pain, and yesterday I just lolled about, feeling better with every moment. That’s a good thing, because I am as busy as I have ever been, and it was difficult to even take the two days off for this surgery. <\/p>\n

Thank you everyone for your well-wishes. I wrote the same thing in a comment to that original “surgery” post, but figured I would post something on the main page as well.<\/p>\n

I woke up yesterday morning, after a good solid 8 hours of sleep, and the sun hadn’t risen yet. I glanced out my kitchen window and saw some pretty extraordinary things going on in the clouds. I was feeling spry and healed and happy, Mum was still asleep, so I went downstairs and out into the chill dawn to snap a picture of what I saw.<\/p>\n

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Anesthesia was such a breeze I don’t even remember it. I appreciate everyone sharing their experiences, I really do! I don’t remember counting-down, or anything like that. I remember being placed on the table under the shiny lights, with about … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29917"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29917"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29936,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29917\/revisions\/29936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}