She said goodbye too many times before
Thanks, everyone, for your kind words and sympathy. It's ok. I'm glad the doctors are conscientious enough and competent enough not to risk putting in a substandard set of lungs. We knew all along it might be a false alarm; lungs are the second most, um, compromisable? organ, next to hearts. Kidneys and livers, you can practically just toss in the fridge overnight and then transplant them the next morning after the second cup of coffee, but-- this dead kid, he was eighteen, apparently he was brain dead before his body stopped functioning, so he aspirated some fluids into his lungs in the period in between and the right lung got infected. It happens. They were talking as we left about whether it was now too late to put the left lung in someone who only needs one. I hope it wasn't, that would be a bummer.
It was sort of a good experience, anyway, because all the nurses and doctors and whatever-- we must've talked to twenty-thirty people-- were so nice and competent. It really makes you feel safe, how thoroughly everyone there seems to understand what they're doing. The contrast with the hospital back in North Carolina, where Jeremy felt he had to stay awake all night whenever he was inpatient there in order to watch the nurses do his IVs and make sure they didn't screw it up, couldn't be more striking. I hate not being at home, but that's a compelling argument for it right there.
We learned that Mayo has, as the surgeon put it, "no rookies" on the transplant team-- that nobody is doing his first transplant on a Mayo patient, that all their surgeons have done this "many times before," which is comforting. We also learned some fairly disgusting details about how, in CF patients, the scarring from incessant infection and tissue death sometimes means the lungs, or parts of the lungs, get "stuck" inside the patient-- I know, right-- and they have to, like, scrape these sticky dead patches out with a little hoe or something. Which is fascinating, in an appalling way. Like most things I hear about at Mayo.
They call it a "dry run" when this happens, this business with the false alarm and the last-minute no go (and it happens pretty often, I gather, sometimes more than once to the same patient, because organs degrade so quickly and their standards for what they'll put in a person are so high; they told us that it's happened before that they've already knocked the patient out before they decide the organ's not up to snuff, and the patient wakes up thinking he's been transplanted and they have to tell him it was a false alarm, which would suck so badly, I can't imagine), and that's apt, because, well, now we know what happens when we get the call. And it's not so worrisome. We were mostly sort of zoned because our sleeping hours are so irregular that we hadn't slept at all. We were wired, too, or I was, but mostly we felt like we were in good hands and everything was going to be okay. So. Next time.
And hopefully when we get the call for real, my parents won't be in France and can come be with me for the surgery. I didn't even call them, because I didn't want to ruin their day if it turned out to be a false alarm. I was going to call them when Jeremy actually went into surgery. Jeremy did call his parents, and I think they'd driven about two hours towards us before he called to say it was all off.
After we got home I was trying out this awesome new cast-on method for toe-up socks, and it worked so well that I decided not to pull it out when I was done experimenting with it, but instead to knit a pair of nice warm socks in the olive green lambswool yarn I have left over from the newsboy cap I just finished. Off-the-rack socks are never thick enough for me, and wearing two pairs makes my feet sweat.
It was sort of a good experience, anyway, because all the nurses and doctors and whatever-- we must've talked to twenty-thirty people-- were so nice and competent. It really makes you feel safe, how thoroughly everyone there seems to understand what they're doing. The contrast with the hospital back in North Carolina, where Jeremy felt he had to stay awake all night whenever he was inpatient there in order to watch the nurses do his IVs and make sure they didn't screw it up, couldn't be more striking. I hate not being at home, but that's a compelling argument for it right there.
We learned that Mayo has, as the surgeon put it, "no rookies" on the transplant team-- that nobody is doing his first transplant on a Mayo patient, that all their surgeons have done this "many times before," which is comforting. We also learned some fairly disgusting details about how, in CF patients, the scarring from incessant infection and tissue death sometimes means the lungs, or parts of the lungs, get "stuck" inside the patient-- I know, right-- and they have to, like, scrape these sticky dead patches out with a little hoe or something. Which is fascinating, in an appalling way. Like most things I hear about at Mayo.
They call it a "dry run" when this happens, this business with the false alarm and the last-minute no go (and it happens pretty often, I gather, sometimes more than once to the same patient, because organs degrade so quickly and their standards for what they'll put in a person are so high; they told us that it's happened before that they've already knocked the patient out before they decide the organ's not up to snuff, and the patient wakes up thinking he's been transplanted and they have to tell him it was a false alarm, which would suck so badly, I can't imagine), and that's apt, because, well, now we know what happens when we get the call. And it's not so worrisome. We were mostly sort of zoned because our sleeping hours are so irregular that we hadn't slept at all. We were wired, too, or I was, but mostly we felt like we were in good hands and everything was going to be okay. So. Next time.
And hopefully when we get the call for real, my parents won't be in France and can come be with me for the surgery. I didn't even call them, because I didn't want to ruin their day if it turned out to be a false alarm. I was going to call them when Jeremy actually went into surgery. Jeremy did call his parents, and I think they'd driven about two hours towards us before he called to say it was all off.
After we got home I was trying out this awesome new cast-on method for toe-up socks, and it worked so well that I decided not to pull it out when I was done experimenting with it, but instead to knit a pair of nice warm socks in the olive green lambswool yarn I have left over from the newsboy cap I just finished. Off-the-rack socks are never thick enough for me, and wearing two pairs makes my feet sweat.