(no subject)
I've posted this on Facebook and sent it to a variety of people via e-mail, but just in case I didn't catch you, here's a big update about my surgery tomorrow. What surgery? In case you missed it, I'm donating a kidney to my stepmom, Dede, tomorrow morning. I have high hopes that all will be well. Of course, your finger-crossing is much appreciated.
The short version is that surgery will take place early tomorrow. I go in at 630 and will be knocked out by 830am. It's expected that surgery will last for several hours and I should be in my first recovery room around 130pm. I'll spend a couple of hours there and will then be wheeled into my own private room where Mike will be waiting for me in the late afternoon. The less-good news is that, contrary to what I was told by the previous, inept surgeon, odds are good that I'll be in the hospital until late Friday, regardless of whether I have laparoscopic surgery or open. The good news is that my surgeon is pretty confident lap surgery will work. Your continued prayers/good wishes/etc. on that front are appreciated. I really like my surgeon and I'm going into this surgery with great hope. If you want the long version (which is interesting to people like me, but I understand not everyone is into this kind of stuff), keep reading.
Yesterday Mike and I spent several hours at the UW Med Center getting prepped for surgery. I finally got to meet Dr. Careful (aka Dr. Baktha, a South Indian man with the best salt-and-pepper beard I have ever seen) and ask a lot of final questions of my nurse coordinator. I met someone from the anesthesiology team who explained the ways in which they would make me forget what was going to happen to me. I had my blood drawn and my urine collected (good news, I'm not pregnant!). And then I went out and ate copious amounts of food at Red Robin because A) we don't have it in New York, B) bottomless steak fries are proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy, and C) today I'm on an all-liquid diet and I won't feel like eating much for a while, so best git while the gittin's good.
Today I woke up at 5:30am at the advice of my nurse coordinator to eat some breakfast. I have to ingest only clear liquids for 24 hours before surgery, which means I won't eat anything until sometime late Wednesday afternoon, so the idea is to stock up on nutrition right beforehand. I don't think it ever occurred to me how hard it'd be to muster up an appetite at 5:30am, but now I know. I attempted to eat things that would stick to my ribs and give me bang for my energy buck, but time was also of the essence and having a sleeping family down the hall meant I didn't want to clatter around with a bunch of dishes. Somehow I ended up eating two packets of instant oatmeal, a cold slice of pepperoni pizza, and a container of blueberry Greek yoghurt. Attempting to sleep on a terrifically full belly is not something I'd recommend, but I managed it eventually. As of now, it's a steady diet of Gatorade, water, clear juice, and broth. Between 8pm and midnight I will have to drink two liters of water, which means I'll be up half the night running down the hall. I am convinced that part of surgery prep is to make the patient as ornery as possible. As of midnight, I am not permitted any fluids until after surgery, at which point I'm going to make out with a cup of ice chips.
Mike and I will hit up the anesthesiology clinic at oh-dark-thirty in the morning (6:30am) tomorrow where I'll get a new wardrobe. In addition to the anticipated hospital gown, I'll also have my calves measured for a pair of exceedingly close-fitting compression socks that don't have toes (good news: I can still get a pedicure). Once I crank those things on, I'll get two spaceman leggings that will stimulate the muscles and encourage blood flow (thereby decreasing my risk of blood clots) while I'm out and in my first several hours of recovery. I fully intend to have Mike take a photograph of this, so you can look forward to seeing that later. I'll meet my anesthesiologist, will have any final questions answered, and may optionally take what the staff refers to as a "don't care" pill. I'm going to decide at the time whether or not I want the pill. For people like me, who are perhaps overly fascinated by the entire process and who do not like a loss of control, it may be more relaxing to stay lucid. We'll see. At this point, I get my own gurney and Mike will say goodbye to my right kidney (forever) and me (for several hours).
By 8:30am, I will get knocked out and will get tube in my throat to keep it from collapsing (!). I will also get a catheter put in, which will be removed later when I'm awake (!!!). Surgery will be underway by 9am. There will be four incisions made in my abdomen, generally all on the right side. The largest, about 7cm, will be for Dr. Baktha's hand. The others, quite small, will be for things like lights, CO2 tubes, the camera, and the inflatable contraption that will hold my liver out of the way. Though he was reticent to put a percentage on the likelihood of having to go to open surgery when we spoke before, Dr. Baktha said yesterday that my risk is actually only slightly greater than that of someone with normal anatomy: around 2%. The risk is still very much there -- everything is magnified on that teeny tiny camera, and they're working in close quarters, so the smallest amount of blood can cause a "red out" and require them to go open because of decreased visibility. Please pray that this is not the case and that Dr. Baktha is as totally badass as he seems.
Within about three hours, my kidney will be out of my body and off to a man I'm lovingly calling the butcher. His job is to prep it for placement in Dede's body, which means trimming off any excess fat (though Dr. Baktha assures me I have very little -- I'm weirdly proud of this), flushing it out, and tying up any of my extra arteries/veins, etc. I'll then get a couple of alloy staples to close off loose connectors (like the one that goes from my kidney to my bladder, for instance) and these will stay in my body for the rest of my life. I'll get some more staples in my muscles and will then be closed up with some combination of glue and Steri-Strips. They'll wheel me into my first recovery room where I'll be brught out of my fugue state and forced to breathe into a spirometer and made to stand up and stuff. It will be generally quite unpleasant (the repetition of the phrase "hit by a truck" is not promising). I'll eventually be placed in my own room, which I am assured has wi-fi. It is here I will see Mike again for the first time in about eight hours. I'm sure it will feel longer to him than it does to me, since I will be heavily drugged and he will be heavily anxious.
My nurse coordinator told me I'd be there until at least Friday, which was a surprise given what I'd been told before. I continue to get the impression that the previous surgeon was awarded his medical degree based on his good looks and shiny hair rather than his doctoral acumen, and it's based on phrases like these: "Yeah, that surgeon likes to push for donors to leave after a day, but almost none of them do. They all stay until at least Friday anyway." Oh. Meeting Dr. Baktha was really wonderful. We had a rocky start on the phone last week, but he's immensely reassuring in person and clearly a very competent doctor (my friend Kelly, who has connections in the healthcare world, had her people look into him and he's got a stellar record). He showed me all kinds of awesome pictures of my body -- mostly from the CT scan I had in August -- so I could see the unusual anatomy he had described on the phone. As he digitally scrolled through the layers of my body, front to back and top to bottom, he showed me where the extra vein is on my left kidney and was able to give me an accurate picture of what has to get moved out of the way when he goes in there to work. I could spend all days looking at radiological scans of my body, I really could. Science rules. My two kidneys are differently sized, which isn't that unusual. Though the right kidney will be slightly more challenging to remove because the veins are shorter, that's the one Dede's getting. It is common practice to leave the donor with the larger kidney, and it was neat to see the visual difference in size between the two (my right kidney is about 170ccs, my left about 210). It is ultimately the size that made his decision on which I'd keep, but it also means I'll keep the one with the funky veins.
Oh, and I also asked Dr. Baktha if I could get a photograph of my kidney once it's out of my body and he assured me I could. "We'll take a picture for you after it's been cleaned up," he said. That makes TWO things you can look forward to, gentle reader.
After one more chat with the nurse coordinator to tie up loose ends (and also hear her conciliatory whisper that if her mom or sister ever had to have transplant surgery she'd insist on Dr. Baktha as the surgeon -- score!) it was off to anesthesiology. Nothing particularly new there, but I did learn that I'll have to take off the sparkly silver nail polish I carefully applied the other day because I'll have a little duck beak on my finger that measures the oxygen in my body via infrared light beamed through my fingernail. SCIENCE, YOU GUYS! Amazing.
Now all I have to do is drink a bunch of liquid and pack a bag. I bought the new Michael Pollan (Food Rules), a Nick Hornby novel I didn't know about (Slam), and a couple of magazines (Bust, Cook's Country) to keep me occupied when I'm not sleeping or surfing the Internet. After surgery I'll need a good eight weeks before I'm allowed to lift anything greater than ten pounds, but nothing else really needs to change in terms of my diet or my lifestyle (but I tell you what, I never get tired of the doctors and nurses saying, "oh, hey, you work out, huh? You're so healthy."). I can eat whatever I want after surgery, though I will likely only want small meals as I'll feel bloated and uncomfortable. I'm betting two bucks I'll be asking for a Qdoba burrito on Thursday. I am allowed visitors on Thursday and Friday but don't know yet if I'll feel up to it -- please e-mail (I'll obviously be checking e-mail, because that's how I roll) and I'll let you know how I'm doing. And, as always, please keep Dede (who seemed in good spirits yesterday but is obviously going through a HELLUVA lot right now), me, our surgical team, and Papa and Mike your thoughts. We're gonna come out of this one just fine, I can feel it. Catch you on the flipside.
The short version is that surgery will take place early tomorrow. I go in at 630 and will be knocked out by 830am. It's expected that surgery will last for several hours and I should be in my first recovery room around 130pm. I'll spend a couple of hours there and will then be wheeled into my own private room where Mike will be waiting for me in the late afternoon. The less-good news is that, contrary to what I was told by the previous, inept surgeon, odds are good that I'll be in the hospital until late Friday, regardless of whether I have laparoscopic surgery or open. The good news is that my surgeon is pretty confident lap surgery will work. Your continued prayers/good wishes/etc. on that front are appreciated. I really like my surgeon and I'm going into this surgery with great hope. If you want the long version (which is interesting to people like me, but I understand not everyone is into this kind of stuff), keep reading.
Yesterday Mike and I spent several hours at the UW Med Center getting prepped for surgery. I finally got to meet Dr. Careful (aka Dr. Baktha, a South Indian man with the best salt-and-pepper beard I have ever seen) and ask a lot of final questions of my nurse coordinator. I met someone from the anesthesiology team who explained the ways in which they would make me forget what was going to happen to me. I had my blood drawn and my urine collected (good news, I'm not pregnant!). And then I went out and ate copious amounts of food at Red Robin because A) we don't have it in New York, B) bottomless steak fries are proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy, and C) today I'm on an all-liquid diet and I won't feel like eating much for a while, so best git while the gittin's good.
Today I woke up at 5:30am at the advice of my nurse coordinator to eat some breakfast. I have to ingest only clear liquids for 24 hours before surgery, which means I won't eat anything until sometime late Wednesday afternoon, so the idea is to stock up on nutrition right beforehand. I don't think it ever occurred to me how hard it'd be to muster up an appetite at 5:30am, but now I know. I attempted to eat things that would stick to my ribs and give me bang for my energy buck, but time was also of the essence and having a sleeping family down the hall meant I didn't want to clatter around with a bunch of dishes. Somehow I ended up eating two packets of instant oatmeal, a cold slice of pepperoni pizza, and a container of blueberry Greek yoghurt. Attempting to sleep on a terrifically full belly is not something I'd recommend, but I managed it eventually. As of now, it's a steady diet of Gatorade, water, clear juice, and broth. Between 8pm and midnight I will have to drink two liters of water, which means I'll be up half the night running down the hall. I am convinced that part of surgery prep is to make the patient as ornery as possible. As of midnight, I am not permitted any fluids until after surgery, at which point I'm going to make out with a cup of ice chips.
Mike and I will hit up the anesthesiology clinic at oh-dark-thirty in the morning (6:30am) tomorrow where I'll get a new wardrobe. In addition to the anticipated hospital gown, I'll also have my calves measured for a pair of exceedingly close-fitting compression socks that don't have toes (good news: I can still get a pedicure). Once I crank those things on, I'll get two spaceman leggings that will stimulate the muscles and encourage blood flow (thereby decreasing my risk of blood clots) while I'm out and in my first several hours of recovery. I fully intend to have Mike take a photograph of this, so you can look forward to seeing that later. I'll meet my anesthesiologist, will have any final questions answered, and may optionally take what the staff refers to as a "don't care" pill. I'm going to decide at the time whether or not I want the pill. For people like me, who are perhaps overly fascinated by the entire process and who do not like a loss of control, it may be more relaxing to stay lucid. We'll see. At this point, I get my own gurney and Mike will say goodbye to my right kidney (forever) and me (for several hours).
By 8:30am, I will get knocked out and will get tube in my throat to keep it from collapsing (!). I will also get a catheter put in, which will be removed later when I'm awake (!!!). Surgery will be underway by 9am. There will be four incisions made in my abdomen, generally all on the right side. The largest, about 7cm, will be for Dr. Baktha's hand. The others, quite small, will be for things like lights, CO2 tubes, the camera, and the inflatable contraption that will hold my liver out of the way. Though he was reticent to put a percentage on the likelihood of having to go to open surgery when we spoke before, Dr. Baktha said yesterday that my risk is actually only slightly greater than that of someone with normal anatomy: around 2%. The risk is still very much there -- everything is magnified on that teeny tiny camera, and they're working in close quarters, so the smallest amount of blood can cause a "red out" and require them to go open because of decreased visibility. Please pray that this is not the case and that Dr. Baktha is as totally badass as he seems.
Within about three hours, my kidney will be out of my body and off to a man I'm lovingly calling the butcher. His job is to prep it for placement in Dede's body, which means trimming off any excess fat (though Dr. Baktha assures me I have very little -- I'm weirdly proud of this), flushing it out, and tying up any of my extra arteries/veins, etc. I'll then get a couple of alloy staples to close off loose connectors (like the one that goes from my kidney to my bladder, for instance) and these will stay in my body for the rest of my life. I'll get some more staples in my muscles and will then be closed up with some combination of glue and Steri-Strips. They'll wheel me into my first recovery room where I'll be brught out of my fugue state and forced to breathe into a spirometer and made to stand up and stuff. It will be generally quite unpleasant (the repetition of the phrase "hit by a truck" is not promising). I'll eventually be placed in my own room, which I am assured has wi-fi. It is here I will see Mike again for the first time in about eight hours. I'm sure it will feel longer to him than it does to me, since I will be heavily drugged and he will be heavily anxious.
My nurse coordinator told me I'd be there until at least Friday, which was a surprise given what I'd been told before. I continue to get the impression that the previous surgeon was awarded his medical degree based on his good looks and shiny hair rather than his doctoral acumen, and it's based on phrases like these: "Yeah, that surgeon likes to push for donors to leave after a day, but almost none of them do. They all stay until at least Friday anyway." Oh. Meeting Dr. Baktha was really wonderful. We had a rocky start on the phone last week, but he's immensely reassuring in person and clearly a very competent doctor (my friend Kelly, who has connections in the healthcare world, had her people look into him and he's got a stellar record). He showed me all kinds of awesome pictures of my body -- mostly from the CT scan I had in August -- so I could see the unusual anatomy he had described on the phone. As he digitally scrolled through the layers of my body, front to back and top to bottom, he showed me where the extra vein is on my left kidney and was able to give me an accurate picture of what has to get moved out of the way when he goes in there to work. I could spend all days looking at radiological scans of my body, I really could. Science rules. My two kidneys are differently sized, which isn't that unusual. Though the right kidney will be slightly more challenging to remove because the veins are shorter, that's the one Dede's getting. It is common practice to leave the donor with the larger kidney, and it was neat to see the visual difference in size between the two (my right kidney is about 170ccs, my left about 210). It is ultimately the size that made his decision on which I'd keep, but it also means I'll keep the one with the funky veins.
Oh, and I also asked Dr. Baktha if I could get a photograph of my kidney once it's out of my body and he assured me I could. "We'll take a picture for you after it's been cleaned up," he said. That makes TWO things you can look forward to, gentle reader.
After one more chat with the nurse coordinator to tie up loose ends (and also hear her conciliatory whisper that if her mom or sister ever had to have transplant surgery she'd insist on Dr. Baktha as the surgeon -- score!) it was off to anesthesiology. Nothing particularly new there, but I did learn that I'll have to take off the sparkly silver nail polish I carefully applied the other day because I'll have a little duck beak on my finger that measures the oxygen in my body via infrared light beamed through my fingernail. SCIENCE, YOU GUYS! Amazing.
Now all I have to do is drink a bunch of liquid and pack a bag. I bought the new Michael Pollan (Food Rules), a Nick Hornby novel I didn't know about (Slam), and a couple of magazines (Bust, Cook's Country) to keep me occupied when I'm not sleeping or surfing the Internet. After surgery I'll need a good eight weeks before I'm allowed to lift anything greater than ten pounds, but nothing else really needs to change in terms of my diet or my lifestyle (but I tell you what, I never get tired of the doctors and nurses saying, "oh, hey, you work out, huh? You're so healthy."). I can eat whatever I want after surgery, though I will likely only want small meals as I'll feel bloated and uncomfortable. I'm betting two bucks I'll be asking for a Qdoba burrito on Thursday. I am allowed visitors on Thursday and Friday but don't know yet if I'll feel up to it -- please e-mail (I'll obviously be checking e-mail, because that's how I roll) and I'll let you know how I'm doing. And, as always, please keep Dede (who seemed in good spirits yesterday but is obviously going through a HELLUVA lot right now), me, our surgical team, and Papa and Mike your thoughts. We're gonna come out of this one just fine, I can feel it. Catch you on the flipside.