Pre-Op Preparation
I missed posting yesterday for #Blaugust because I spent most of the day at the hospital. We arrived at around 10 am and did registration at admissions, which was quick—surprisingly so. As usually there’s a huge queue at most hospitals here in Quebec City.
The speedy registration meant we were 30 minutes early for my first appointment. Not that I should have worried, as soon as we turned up and handed in my paperwork, I was seen by the nurse for the first round of tests.
Now, not to upset those of you with delicate constitutions, they drew five (5) vials of blood. Stuck not one, but two different swabs up either side of my nose and then …
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Asked me to pee in a damn beaker the size of a thimble. Worse … if there is something worse than hovering over the toilet trying to direct a stream of pee into a tiny cup all without wetting your hands, the toilet seat, and other bodily parts, then I was about to be introduced to it.
I had to manually do not one but two (2) butt swabs. Yes, dear gentle reader, you read right. Two butt swabs. I won’t elaborate further.
Oh the joys of pre-op tests.
To be honest, after all that acrobating done in the confined space of the toilet adjacent to a busy room full of people trying to ignore all the needles and blood, all I wanted to do was go have a long, hot, bath!
The next appointment was comparatively sedentary after all that. We made our way across the corridor to get an ECG, in which all I had to do was lie on a cold table, let the nurse attach electrodes to me and run her machine. The attaching and detaching of the electrodes took longer than the actual 30 seconds of the ECG itself. But oh, look, another piece of paper was added to my folder. It was growing exponentially.
At this point it was 11:30 and my next appointment with the internal medicine specialist wasn’t till 1pm, we decided to hoof it off out the hospital, across the street, to a perfectly placed fast food joint and coffee shop doing sandwiches, and had an early lunch.
The afternoon session was pleasantly sedentary with the nurse on my case, Stephanie, taking my weight, blood pressure, sugar and height. All duly noted we sat for 15 minutes in the waiting room till we met the resident to the Internal Medicine specialist. A nice, eager young doctor who didn’t look old enough to be practising medicine.
What followed was almost 45 minutes of discussing the result of the day, filling out yet more paperwork, and consent forms, and discussing the surgery itself. At the end of the session he let slip (as I’m sure he wasn’t supposed to tell us) that my Op date was, provisionally, August 25th. A Monday.
Whisking us out of his office with an ever growing file, he guided us back to Stephanie, who then went through yet more paperwork with us, mostly to do with the day before the op and the day of the op and the things that I needed to not only do, but what would happen upon arrival at the hospital.
We both left the hospital with brain fog trying to digest all the information, not least of which the stuff I have to do at home the night before and the morning of the operation.
But, dear reader, I’ll leave that story for tomorrow. Thanks for reading this far.