I am beginning to suspect enemy action or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Paranoia Part 3

Okay, this is a continuation of the the posts here and here. In which I detail levels of suckiness as they have been predominant in my life lately. Yes, I have already admitted to this being very emo of me, but karma has been smacking me around.
22nd February, 2008 530am In a driving snowstorm we travel to the MRI clinic in Holly Michigan, and it looks as if the city and county are completely failing the morning rush crowd yet again. The roads at every level from side street to Interstate have not been plowed, salted or touched except by other traffic. I get to experience the MRI tunnel for an estimated 18 minutes! To keep myself sane while being loaded like a torpedo I use the simple expedient of running over the entire In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida song in my head. Let me stress that both the person working the front desk there and the MRI tech were both some of the best people I have met in the medical profession.
22nd February, 2008 0900 My wife manages the superhuman task of dropping the kids off at their north eastern suburban school, and getting me back to the south suburb containing the Hospital and Doctors office, all in under an hour. While we are waiting, Stacy points out an article on the wall about a woman who had already been diagnosed as having just a flu by 10 plus other doctors. But Dr. Lisa Guyot caught that she had a brain tumor with the end result being that she saved her life. I am comforted, but still in dread.
I now get to meet, the now famous in my mind, Dr. Guyot. She pops my MRI results (Link to a near full size You can see a moderate size at the bottom of this article) up on the wall, and shows where my spinal cord is a normal looking white line, then where it stops completely, resumes weakly, then stops completely again the next vertebra down, and then shows us a top down view showing how two of my discs are completely out of place. She then introduces Stacy and I to our new vocabulary words for the day “Laminectomy and Discectomy” and the code phrases “L3-4 and L4-5”. Let me sum this up for you, she recommends surgery. I still cannot beat the dread that surgery will result in bad things for me, so I ask about options and if I could possibly heal normally over time. She gives me the truth, which in summation is, perhaps over much time and pain. Time measured in years. Since then a solid net education has shown me the question was dumb, and a few medical professionals seeing my MRI’s have actually gone pale or flushed. So, I ask for a minute, Stacy and I talk, and I decide to hell with it, this doctor has the solid level of confidence that I demonstrate when fixing a computer hardware/software/network issue, so I suck it up and let her know we are ready to go. She really knows her stuff!
22nd February, 2008 – 10AM After being warned I may have to be catheterized to provide a urine sample before my surgery, I use the warm water method to provide said sample, No one who has ever experienced catheterization will willingly undergo it twice given an option 🙂
22nd February, 2008 – 1130AM – I am taken back to be prepped for my surgery, where a nurse named Jennifer (matching the name of my ex-wife, setting my sense of dread up a notch) sticks various things in my flesh, and lets me know a nice person will be around soon to make me go beddy-bye. I start going over my life in my head because I figure this is my last chance to reconsider anything I have ever done. I find a good deal of peace, a good deal of sorrow and am actually shocked to find that I am free of a lot of the drama I have faced in life. My only concern is that I will never be able to spend another night living with Stacy, that my mother will be really bummed, and that I will never be able to make amends for any mistakes, and I have made a few ( … “And bad mistakes, I've made a few, I've had my share of sand kicked in my face, But I've come through”… oh great! Lyrics from a dead guy in my head) I get to see Stacy a last time, and try to do the stiff upper lip thing (While in the back of my head the tune to “Modern Major General” plays, so I realize the drugs are REALLY kicking in) but fail miserably.
22nd February 2008 – Sometime roughly between 1130AM and 3pm – I remember waking as I was wheeled into another room, and I try to be jocular in my drugged state because I expect to die in that room and figure it will be enough of a bad day for the people working there. I hear the words “combative” and that is it. Since then I have talked to a nursing professional who told me that people with strong personalities tend to freak a little as they go under and come out of anesthesia so the odds are that I was being combative, but I was trying to be a good guy.
22nd February, 2008 – Roughly 3pm I wake up and realize I am in a different room than the one I lost consciousness in, this is heartening, and I first try to move my legs and cannot, this really sucks! I call out, and a voice answers, and my first question is, “Am I okay?” When the voice answers in the affirmative I ask her name, then apologize for probably having asked that question before since I am hit with a sudden rush of déjà vu so I figure it is my fifth time asking the same question. Turns out her name is Gail and she is my recovery nurse. Around this time I start to finish my self-inventory and realize a few things. First, I can move my legs, but still do not have sensation in any place I had lost previously, but my feet are strapped into those little devices that inflate and deflate which once gave my mother weird hallucinations of roller skating while recovering from surgery. I have an oxygen line in my nose, the IV with the HUGE gauge that had been in my left hand was now in my right hand, and I was hooked up to a lot of wires and such. Lastly, but certainly most noticeable was that my back felt, well, PAIN, and oddly enough my chest was killing me. Also my head was more than a little woozy.
I asked Gail if the pain would be going away and I was told that some things had to occur before she could give me much more for it. The monitor kept being unhappy with my heart rate and oxygen level, so I was trying to casually breath in through the nose, out through the mouth thing since I have had practice over the years finding my happy place. Gail (The Angel Nurse of Recovery) told me something along the lines of what I was thinking, which was to think of a place that was happy. I told her I couldn’t do it without Stacy there, so I picked a spot in Northern Germany. Out in the woods behind The Bistro near Loruper Weg in Sogel Germany about late August, with the sun coming through the trees. I remember playing war games out there and during the breaks it was a great place to lay back and enjoy what were some very old woods. Imagined Stacy sitting there with me, and both of us just digging on the riff of a wonderful moment. Gail kept checking on me, and helping me out, she was the best single nurse I have encountered in my entire 38 years, she made me keep my head up during a rotten time and set the highest level of professionalism and patient care that I have ever imagined existing. (Gail Boone, 3rd Floor Recovery, Genesys Hospital!!!) She set a standard that most nurses SHOULD aspire to achieve.
Finally, I got to see Stacy again in the real world, and it was delightful! I blew the stiff upper lip thing again (…I am the very model of a modern Major-General….) but made it by, and I could tell she was hurting for me without a word being said. Gail the Wonder Nurse lets Stacy stay as long as she can, but then they have to clear her out and I start waiting for a room. Waiting….waiting…..(….” Here behind my wall, Waiting for the worms to come. ( worms to come. ) In perfect isolation, Here behind my wall, Waiting for the worms to come.” Drugs still working!!! But now they are onto Pink Floyd!)
I get the news that a room is ready for me, and they dispatch my mother who has been watching one of my stepdaughters while Stacy hopped out to take care of life (She had spent the entire day caring for others and needed food and shower) to the room. Waiting… They change the room I am getting! Waiting… Gail the Wonder Nurse manages to find my mother through the art of cell phonage and persistence and lets her slip into recovery along with Brienna to see my weakened state. I am actually glad my step daughter was there, because honestly, if it had been just my “Mommy” I might have broken out crying.
22 February 2008 – Now they finally move me to a room, which seems like a wonderful idea until I realize it means giving up the bed I have occupied for hours and actually having to MOVE, well, shift, movement is out of the question. The great news is that Stacy is on her way back, and Sara (without an H…heh! The things you remember while on morphine), my new nurse is both efficient, cool, and pretty to boot.
To be continued…