Haze and Laze

I can't open my refrigerator, but I can type! All is well, I'm uncomfortable, but not in any kind of excruciating pain. I am thrilled to death that my surgeon only took one lymph node, and hopefully, the pathology on it will be clear. Everything has gone really smoothly.

I'm grateful to the last minute advice from a friend of a friend who just had the same surgery, that I really should have someone at the hospital with me, because that turned out to be very true. Luckily my sister came down from Boston with little warning and that was a big help, considering the comedy of errors that is an overnight stay at this particular institution of higher healing.

There was an endless stream of nurses and CNAs telling me things they were going to do and then going off on their flighty ways doing none of them. The compression stockings to keep me from throwing a clot were brought in, but never put on, they languished on the window shelf. I wasn't at all pleased when they came in with a package of giant swabs and told me they had to swab my anus and my nostrils to test for certain bacteria that if present would cause me to be relocated. Luckily, those stayed on the window shelf too and I'll admit to conspiring with my sister to shove them out of view so as not to offer a visual cue. They told me about the nice warm towels they would bring to wash off the pre-surgical, brown anti-germ stuff, instead my friend Gini who took me home helped me wash it off there, no warm towels.

While I've had my blood pressure and temperature taken countless times in the last few weeks, they weren't all that interested once I was actually in the hospital, they stopped in for this only once or twice. After my sister left, they apparently didn't want me getting up alone to go to the bathroom, but they didn't tell me this, they just set an alarm on the bed, so when, in a dreamy, peaceful vicodan haze, I got up to go, the alarm started screaming and three nurses ran in and I was terrified, thought I was having a silent heart attack or some terrible thing that had set off an alarm, code blue.

Really though, a short and pleasant stay and I lucked out with a private room. I'm home with lots of vicodan and currently waiting for a ditzy sounding visiting nurse who's coming to empty my drains and change my bandages. She asked me what kind of bandages I needed and was disappointed that I didn't have a clue. Am I supposed to know what kind of bandages I need? I was sound asleep when they put them on, I have no idea what's under there.

According to my surgeon, my insurance company was fighting with them until the night before about covering the lymph node biopsy. This is the common and necessary procedure, so it's pretty shocking and crazy that they considered denying it and all the while there are folks protesting at the supreme court because they don't want health care reform, so maybe "crazy" is the word of the day. That and healing, I plan to heal fast, I'm a good healer, heal, heal, heal. One week of vicodan haze and laze, then the drains come out and one week of getting it together and then I want to enjoy the two weeks before chemo starts again. That's my plan, no complications, speedy healing, moving on.