I've been fairly fortunately in life so far, avoiding any serious surgery well into my 50s. The most that ever happened to me involving a hospital was a broken thumb, an errant q-tip in my ear, and the occasional set of a few stitches in the ER. Generally, I've been really lucky in avoiding most maladies that get younger people admitted, like serious sickness or car accidents. However, my number finally came up this week, and I had to go in for a diagnostic procedure to determine if I might have cancer.
These days, catching cancer early is a huge advantage and frequently produces very good results in the majority of cases. Stage 1 can be frequently dealt with via rapid isolated removal and then monitoring for a few years to make sure everything was caught. It's when things get into Stage 3 or Stage 4, the success figure starts to make a deep drop, mainly because the cancer has begun to spread into critical organs of the body as well as the lymph nodes. At that point, you're dealing with chemo, significant efforts, and a strong chance that even if solved, you might have a relapse in 5 years because it was hiding somewhere else in the body. So, long story short, dealing with preventative or early diagnostics is a good thing.
What's no so good is the pre-op prep. Depending on the procedure, you're looking at a few days of misery. For me, it felt like was dealing with a stomach flu by the time I was prepped and ready for the Op gurney to be rolled in. However, being my first time, I was awake enough to be looking around to see what was going on. TV has a bad habit of giving you this idea surgery room involves a big overhead lamp, a silver table and a ceramic-tiled room that can be washed down if needed after wards. None of that matched reality. Instead, my bed was the operating table, wheeled in and wheeled out afterwards. There were about ten different computers running, and the doctor himself was busy at one of them while the nurses and anestheseologist were prepping me to go under. About half a dozen wires and taping later, I'm hooked up, and in goes the drugs to my IV to knock me out. I'm told it might feel like a burning sensation going in, but instead the IV drip just suddenly felt a bit cold. I looked at the clock, felt a good bit dizzy, closed my eyes to blink, and I was out. That's it, I remember nothing.
Later, I wake up in recovery, groggy but basically in the same position I remember blinking in. Except now, I'm looking at a wall, their noise, beeping sounds, wires strung over me, and I'm very warm. It turns out recovery rooms have this neat disposable paper blanket that inflates. It gets hooked up to a warm air blower and acts like a puffy comforter. I spent a few minutes wanting to pretend I was still asleep I was so comfortable.
After about 30 minutes or so, I looked at the clock and confirmed with the recovery nurse I'd been out for about an hour, and I got my first snack. Those saltine crackers never tasted soooo gooood. After another hour, I was prepped for leaving, wheeled out to my family car and that was it. Surgery done. Not bad for a somewhat extensive cancer check. I could have done without the prep process, but the care and actual procedure was pretty interesting while I was awake. The only downside was the amount of waiting in admitting and in the bed until it was my turn. I could have been much happier playing Minecraft in bed waiting than looking at some rerun of a calming video. Urrg.
