So, the day for surgery is finally here! I'm so excited and terrified, but at least I will get this taken care of. We wake up to horrific storms and I'm thinking that we will lose power or something that will delay our surgery. Thankfully, that didn't happen, but we did have some gorgeous lightning to watch while on the way in.
Because of the flooding on the roads, we were a little late, but we were immediately brought to the admissions desk and started the process. The only bump that we had that morning was when I first sat down at the admissions desk. I didn't bring my purse, or anything but my phone with me and the first thing that the admissions person said to me was....you have a co-pay today and you don't have your wallet, how are you going to pay? My husband had dropped me off at the front door of the surgery center and was parking the car so he didn't hear her ask me that AND he was the one that had the CC we would be using to make a deductible payment. I guess her rudeness gave me something else to be focusing on and not the upcoming surgery.
We were immediately taken back to the pre-op area to get everything ready for surgery. I have to tell you, the OU Surgery Center in downtown Oklahoma City is a wonderful place to have surgery. The entire nursing staff was incredible, my anesthesiologist was the most detailed I had ever worked with and the pre-surgery area gives you nice warm and fuzzies before you go into surgery so you know you'll be well taken care of when you get out of surgery.
Dallas was my first nurse...I told her that I sometimes had a vasovagual response when I had an IV started and that I had nodes in my hands that sometimes made it difficult to put an IV in. A vasovagual response is a sudden drop in heart rate and blood pressure leading to faiting, often in reaction to a stressful trigger. There were a number of times when I got an IV that I would get hot, see black spots and feel like I was going to pass out. I didn't want this to happen. Thankfully, Dallas was awesome with my IV, it was in before I felt it and she started putting fluids in me as I told her that the storms outside were trying to give me a migraine.
The surgery was scheduled for 7 am, but soon after I got in the wonderful hospital outfit...the head cover, the gown and the booties, we got a call the the doctor was also caught in the storms and he was running about 30 minutes late. That didn't stop the process, we got a visit from the anesthesiologist. As I said, he was the best one I'd ever worked with. He told me exactly how the process would go, what I would be getting (based on the medications that I already took) and how things would affect me. I told him about my impending migraine and he told me that if we had migraine meds with us, he would let me take them. I was also surprised since I wasn't supposed to eat or drink after midnight, that the first three meds that he gave me were pills that I took with water...albeit a very small amount of water, but water nonetheless.
I didn't think that it was affecting me, but my husband told me that I had started talking even more, so I guess the celebrex started to kick in. So, we were just engrossed in some conversation that I thought was important at the time when the doctor finally came in. It was time to do some drawing on me.
The doctor used a tape measure for a couple of measurements, but most of the writing that he did was freehand. The first question he asked me was what size I wanted the final product to be...I told him as small as possible and my husband piped up with something...the doctor looked at me over his glasses and said that was something we should have discussed long before the morning of surgery! He was half joking and half serious. He kept drawing and drawing....my husband said he had a great job...draw on women's breasts all day long...made the doc laugh and made me less self-conscious of him just drawing on my breasts. He gave my husband both of the pens that he used to draw on me...my hubby put them in his Diane collection...along with the titanium plate that my spine surgeon gave him after my second ACDF surgery.
The doc finished and said we needed to get this show on the road, so the anesthesiologist showed up and said he was putting some Versed in my IV and they would be wheeling me away. The last thing I remember before waking up was kissing my husband goodbye and thinking that my headache was already gone.
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