The Day of the Surgery

The day of Jonathan’s surgery has finally arrived. I’ve been wishing for quite a while that we can fast forward time and just speed up the remaining events – but no such luck – I have to wait and go though each event in its own sweat time. Yesterday, Gabby got a call from the surgery department that Jonathan’s surgery was moved up. Instead of surgery starting at 9 am, it was moved up to 7:30 am. This meant that we had to get into the hospital at 6 am to check-in and do the admitting paperwork. And here I was thinking that I’ll get to sleep in a bit longer as I took the day off from work!

We got up at 5 am this morning – which, incidentally is the normal time I wake up during the week. In true Trini style – we did not end leaving home until 6 am and arrived into the hospital at 6:30 am! Of course, as I suspected, our late arrival didn’t affect anything because with admitting the paperwork doesn’t actually take long. While I was waiting in admitting, Gabby took Jonathan to PACU so they can start examining Jonathan and preparing for surgery. Jonathan was so sleepy that although he woke up when we took him to the car, he fell asleep and stayed sleeping all the way to PACU.

He eventually woke up in PACU – because he had to take off his clothes and put on the hospital clothes / gown – but the anestheslogist gave him a little sedative to calm him down. For some reason I wanted to document everything so I took plenty of pictures and had the video camera rolling. The nurses were kidding around that Jonathan had the Paparazzi following him around – especially when he was being rolled into the operating room – both Gabby and I had a camera each and were taking a lot pictures.

I think the biggest concern this morning was Jonathan’s labs. I had taken Jonathan to the clinic yesterday afternoon since Gabby’s eye started to get pink / red and she wasn’t sure whether it was due to pink eye (red eye for the Trinidadian people) or whether it was allergy related. Apparently his white blood count and hemoglobin levels were low but his platelets were above the (normal) minimum – so at least he wouldn’t bleed easily. I’m not sure what the risks were but the surgeon didn’t seem concern about it and a part of me was glad that his surgery wasn’t going to be put off. My thoughts processes at the time were that if his counts didn’t put him at risk then let’s do it because we’ve been waiting so long.

So it’s 10:32 AM and we were paged to come back to the PACU waiting room. Apparently Jonathan’s surgery is done (or so we hope) and we are waiting to see the surgeon. Under normal circumstances – I would be at the nurses window asking every 5 minutes – “is he out?” or “when can we go in to see him?” but this time I’m chilling out and writing a journal entry.