Like REALLY sucked. We got to the hospital at 5:45 this morning to get checked in and prepped. After J and I go through all the formalities of registration and the nurses' questions, we each get changed into our high-fashion hospital gowns, slippers, and hats. I love hospital couture, by the way. I find it so light and airy! This is where the morning starts to go to hell in the proverbial handbasket. J and I are sharing a pre-op room and techs, but have separate nurses. While one tech is taking his admission vital signs, the other is butchering my arm in a severely botched attempt at placing an IV. I am not joking about this; it took every ounce of severely depleted restraint I had to not punch this woman in the face as she stuck me the first time with a way too big IV way too agressively, pushed it through the vein so hard that she blew it, and watched as blood not only poured from said mangled vein onto my arm, but collected under the skin and formed a beautiful golf-ball sized lump. I told her as nicely as I could to get the damn thing out of my arm because it hurt, a lot. She said "Oh, I guess it does, it's a little puffy." YA THINK?!?! She kind of moseyed over to the other side of the bed and mumbled something about having to try again with a smaller gauge needle. I was not very gracious in my thanks for that. While Wonder Tech #1 is setting up for IV attempt Part Deux, her dusty, trusty sidekick shuffles over to get my vital signs. Having heard her arguing with J about his blood pressure and last food intake and whatnot, I was less than impressed before she showed her face on my side of the curtain. My disdain with her was only solidified when she proceeded to argue with me about keeping my swollen, painful arm still so she could get a good blood pressure reading on me while her cohort fished for a vein in my other arm. I seriously contemplated head-butting her for a split second, if only to shut her the hell up! When the Crypt Keeper tech finally finished her business in our room, she scuttled away, never to be seen again. Wonder Tech then went to J's side of the room and tortured him with not one, not two, but THREE attempts to get a good line. Poor guy was dehydrated because of our NPO (nothing by mouth) status as of midnight, as well as the tremendously unpleasant bowel prep he had to do (I was spared this particular torture, I may not be so lucky soon. More on that to come.). He is also not a fan of needles, and by the end of this involuntary piercing festival, was as pale as the sheet on his bed.
After reading about this little adventure, I'm sure you're asking yourself "What a morning! I'm sure surgery was a breeze!" Nope. NOPE, NOPE, NOPE! If you've never had surgery before, let me break this part down for you really quick. After answering a ton of questions that you've answered a million times before for your pre-op nurse, you get your IV placed (as established above, but hopefully with more skilled techs than we had today). Then your ENTIRE surgical team comes in, along with their students, colleagues, friends, spouses, parents, and children. If you're really lucky, they might bring their dogs. Then you answer their questions, sign consents (or autographs, depending on who they are and what they want), if necessary, they shave you, and allow them to draw on you (for surgical site purposes. They aren't artists after all). At this point in our morning, the urologist on the case came down and explained his part of the surgery to us (mostly J, as he is the lead surgeon on his part of the case.) My surgeon was in as well, going over my part of the surgery. This is where it gets majorly hinky; remember a few weeks ago when I wrote about my funky anatomy? Well, turns out that it's more of a challenge than we initially thought. Because of the placement of the major vein that supplies the kidneys, if they were to just go in and take the kidney and try to place it in J, that would leave a renal vein about a half inch long to supply it. Not nearly long enough. We find this out minutes before we are supposed to be in the OR. Our surgeons stepped out for a few minutes, came back and J's surgeon says "I am about to be a very unpopular surgeon this morning". My heart SANK. I had an idea of what was coming at us before he said it. When he told us what I just got done typing, the first thing that came to my mind was "Well isn't that just a punch in the face? My anatomy sucks and now we can't do this." We got *this* close, only to be told "Hey, sorry to tell you this, but I only skimmed over your actual CT scan and went by the report said, so we thought we could go with the traditional approach. We were way wrong. Whoops." So now we get to play the waiting game for two more months, and are on the books (supposedly) for May 1st. For the love of all things, everything had better fall into place the right way, and I mean everything, so that this can go according to Plan B on May 1st.
I'm exhausted, so I'm off to bed. Good night, and please send good vibes our way. We really need them.
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