The Hospital Chronicles

Wow, so much has happened since the last time I blogged, (only about 3 days ago) that I don't know where to begin.

First, to update you, I am here with my laptop at MGH on a slow Saturday night. My surgery went well on Wednesday. They removed the coccyx with the tumor and achieved what they call "clean margins". That means that they got all of the malignant cells while trying to spare as much of the healthy tissue as they could, to make recovery easier.

I'll start off with surgery day. We waited around for a while in the morning and then they brought me in. I've been a regular at the hospital for months now, but the OR area is certainly the "no f-ing around" part of the hospital. It was a little scary. It makes it seem like the rest of the hospital is Candyland. I think you could spray the whole OR area down with an industrial hose and it wouldn't make much difference. Yes, I guess that's probably the point.

A bunch of people involved in the surgery came up to introduce themselves. The anesthesia resident bungled the insertion of my first IV while her superior was watching. He tried to distract me from that horror by making silly jokes and small talk while at the same time advising her on what to do differently without taking over. He was good.

They wheeled me into the OR and my memory kind of ends there, thankfully. Afterwards, I spent about 4 hours in recovery, falling asleep on and off and just dying to see my husband. It was just too long to be away from him after a surgery like that. I wanted to cry from relief when I finally saw him. I think he did too.

I resembled an octupus (and still do for the most part) with tubes instead of tentacles. Most of these were snuck into me in the OR, but I just tried to stay still and not disrupt them afterwardsh. That was pretty much my job actually. On the first night, I just tried to stay laying on my side, but I didn't do a god job notifying the nurse in the middle of the night when I needed help to turn over. As a result, the most uncomfortable part of the first night was my poor bottom leg, which was hanging on by a thread after a night of being crushed by the top leg. I learned from that mistake and I'm speaking up a lot more. A LOT MORE

More chronicles on the days since to come