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Surgery recap
I guess it’s probably time to make some sort of record of events of my surgery before I forget. My admission time was set for 11am so we left just before 10am in order to allow time to find parking as it is fairly limited around the hospital. We got there and eventually found our way into a side entrance. The Scientist and I passed a man pushing a rather large machine of the sort where visibility is quite limited and he was moving fairly quickly. Just afterwards we heard an older woman crying out as the machine hit her. The poor lady was there due to a recent injury to her hip and she was quite distressed. Fortunately some medical staff came to her aid rather quickly. We arrived at the reception area right at 10:30 so were early as were several other patients. My wait wasn’t terribly long and before I knew it was had been admitted and soon was taken to my room. This was different from my gallbladder surgery last year where I stayed on a bed in a pre-op area and didn’t get a room until after surgery was over. At this point I had no idea when surgery was likely to occur. I was pleased to find my room had a nice view that overlooked the Swan River.
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Further observations on surgery
Most of this post was written not long after the previous one but I wanted to see if anything else came to mind before posting. I ended up doing almost a full rewrite after a a note I’d added using the WordPress app on my ipod completely messed up the formatting and I couldn’t be bothered trying to work out how to fix it. Funnily enough, I ended up with a shorter post despite elaborating on the note I’d added.********************************************************************************************************************************Some time during my first night I realized my eyes had become very dry and asked the nurse if it was possible to get some tear replacement drops. Apparently this wasn’t possible, either because it was middle of the night or some other reason. Â Or maybe she didn’t quite understand the problem. She did offer to bring some saline-soaked gauze to put on my eyes to help soothe them and then forgot until morning. While that was helpful, I had more relief when the Scientist brought my drops from home.****************************************************************I’m wondering why my drain wasn’t removed until the day I left hospital. I’d been told it was due to be removed the day after surgery but it wasn’t until the second morning it was finally done. The only reason I can come up with is that the plan was changed when I required the second catheter for my bladder. While my second night’s sleep was a huge improvement over the first, I think I’d have slept even better without the extra tube keeping me on my back.****************************************************************The nurses seemed to have varied ideas of appropriate sites for doing the heparin injection. The first ones were done on the front of each leg. The third one said stomach was better and it did seem to have little bruising. But then another nurse thought it was better on the fatty outside part of the upper thigh. Due to timing, she did two of the injections and I found when I was home there was still quite a bit of bruising there. That was more uncomfortable than the big bruise on the front of one of my legs since I sleep most of the night.A cholangiogram was done during surgery to visualise the bile ducts and the film and report were left for me in the room on day two. When I looked at the report later, I found it showed an area of the common bile duct which had underfilled with contrast. It also showed some mild narrowing of the duct but it went on to say there was free drainage to the duodenum. I plan to ask the surgeon about this at my follow up. Meanwhile, my understanding of this is that a stone was either still there during surgery or had recently been there but possibly had passed out of the duct. From what I’ve read, stones in the common bile duct are uncommon so I wonder if this is the same area that showed evidence of a stone back in November when I had my last attack or if there was a second stone. I stopped having pains after any food in early December so presumed the stone had passed. But I started having some mild pains again a few days before my surgery.****************************************************************I was really happy with the bedside manner of pretty much everyone who looked after me in the hospital. This includes the surgeon, anaesthetist, all the nurses and other staff. It would seem that at least one of them might have been having a bad day but either this wasn’t the case or it was covered up well. I don’t know if the fact this was a private hospital had any bearing or not.****************************************************************After I’d had my surgery and was back at my room, I got the guide to having laparascopic gallbaldder removal. I knew I’d be getting something since the nurse who’d spoken to me by phone told me she’d put information about what to expect at discharge in my file. But the guide should have been given to me before surgery since half of it was related to the the pre-surgery period. While most of it wasn’t of much consequence in the end, it might have been nice to know exactly what to take with me to the hospital. A minor thing was the need of a pen to fill out menu cards while there. It happens I did have a pen with me but only because I planned to work on puzzles while there. More important was the information advising me to take deep breaths after surgery to prevent clots occurring in my lungs. While I was told by the nurse ahead of time to make sure I moved my toes/feet around to keep circulation in my legs, this wasn’t discussed at any point, before or after surgery. Deep breathing really hurt and made me cough so I tended to avoid it. But I’d have made an effort had I known this was expected. I plan to provide some feedback on this since it could be important for some patients. Ironically, the foot/toe movement probably was less of an issue due to the dvt prevention treatment I had over the first night.***************************************************************When I first woke up in recovery, I am almost certain I woke from a dream and remember being a bit surprised by that. I haven’t had that feeling when I’ve had general anaesthesia in the past and I really thought that the type of unconsciousness would have ruled out any type of REM sleep. Either that or I moved into that stage of sleep after the GA was removed but before I regained consciousness. -
A long and rambling account about my gallbladder surgery
Note: This is quite long and rambling with more detail than would interest most people. It’s mostly for my own recollections since I realise most of the details will fade from my memory in no time at all.
I’m still feeling pretty tired but I’m going to get started anyway before I forget too many details. Surgery had been scheduled for Tuesday with admission at 7am. For weeks it seemed the surgery was very far off. Then last week I had a series of phone calls to discuss my upcoming surgery. It started to feel a bit more real by this point. The first call was from the surgeon’s office to advise my admission had been changed from 7am to 11am. I was kind of pleased with this change since it meant I wouldn’t have to leave nearly as early to arrive on time.
Later, I had three separate interviews by phone:
- The admissions office-verifying details and insurance information. Also advising where I needed to go for admissions upon arrival. An “appointment” was made for the nurse to contact me on Saturday to discuss the medical side of things
- The anaesthetist- the usual discussion required before anaesthesia. He asked about any conditions I had and discussed medications I am taking. Somehow I forgot to mention that I have diabetes but didn’t realise this until a couple days later.  He advised my surgery would probably be around 2pm and told me I could eat a light breakfast before 7am.
- The nurse-She covered several details but mostly wanted to discuss my preparations for surgery and the hospital stay. She also suggested I arrive half an hour early as I had blood tests and a cardiogram before surgery.  I found it interesting that she called me on a Saturday instead of a weekday.
I didn’t really start getting properly nervous until the night before surgery. My biggest worry was that it could turn into open surgery even though I had no reason to believe this was likely. I have been a bit concerned all along that surgery might trigger more autoimmune problems as happened after my wisdom teeth removal several years ago but that’s not really something that could ever be predicted so I didn’t let that overshadow the need for surgery. Anyway, I was nervous enough the night before that I took a sleeping pill to make sure I got some rest overnight.