Pre-Op Instructions...

Yesterday afternoon, Georgetown Hospital called to give my my pre-op instructions.  Does it surprise anyone that the thing that concerned me most was the news that I can’t eat or drink after midnight and my surgery isn’t until 12:40pm??? I can live with the fact that apparently the only thing standing between me and a hospital-grade infection is the recommended 2 anti-bacterial wash showers I’ll take in the 24 hours before my surgery.  I thought it was funny that the woman told me, only 5 days before my surgery, that it was very important that I stop taking any advil or aspirin at least 10 days before my surgery (fortunately my plastic surgeon told me that MORE THAN 10 days prior to the surgery).  But I had completely forgotten about the not eating or drinking. My other surgery was early in the morning, so it wasn’t an issue. The good news is, by noon I hope to be sufficiently sedated that I don’t notice how hungry I am, or how much my body is missing caffeine. And then when I wake up a couple of hours later, the nausea from the anesthesia will make me happy that I didn’t eat and will probably keep me from eating until Wednesday.  You’ll all be solidarity fasting with me, right?  That’s what I thought.

My concerns about not eating for a day aside, I am excited to be moving ahead with the second part of reconstruction. I have been told that the recovery from this surgery should be reasonably easy, which is great news. I wouldn’t look for any Facebook check-ins next week at Lifetime Fitness, but hopefully it won’t be too long before I’m at least back at the cafe, slurping my “whey of life” with strawberries/blueberries smoothie, even if I don’t actually work out.

What else…I watched the episode of “Giuliana & Bill” on which she has her double mastectomy. I was surprised at how similar our experiences were, particularly in terms of the conversations she and Bill had leading up to the decision to have the surgery and the conversations that they had in the car on the way to surgery. Of course the similarities ended after the surgery, as it appears that she spent 4 days/nights in a lovely private room that looked like a spa and I, as you might recall, spent the 12 hours after my surgery in the post-anesthesia care unit, next to (i.e., 3 feet from) a woman who spent most of those hours screaming in pain and setting off various alarms, and then was sent home less than 24 hours after my surgery was over. I’m not complaining…I was ready to go home and Georgetown Hospital, while a wonderful facility, is no spa. Fortunately Tuesday’s surgery is out-patient, so I should be home in time for dinner and hopefully the only screaming I’ll hear will be my kids, fighting over whether to watch Jake & the Neverland Pirates or Shake it Up.

I will update Tuesday once I’m lucid. If you see a post on Tuesday afternoon that doesn’t make any sense, it just means that I updated before I was lucid. That might be fun. Oh, and there won’t be any before and after pictures, so don’t get your hopes up. The sharing window might be open, but even I have my limits.

I will leave you with this picture of my kids, because it makes me smile…

 

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