Surgery is moved to tomorrow! I was taken down to the pre-op waiting area around 12 -- noon with my family to wait for surgery today. From 12-2pm we kept receiving messages from the nurses that the doctor was behind and had some emergency things that had to be taken care of so my surgery would be running a little late.
At this point, we were all getting very anxious, especially after waiting all last night, this morning fasting, and now into the afternoon. I took a benedryl to relax me a bit and then fell into a deep sleep.
I spent the afternoon waking and dozing as doctors and nurses came in and out of the room. I finally came out of my sleep when the anesthesiologist came to the room and began asking questions about my history and other generic checklist items before surgery. My father mentioned that I had a pulmonary embolism and the doc looked at us like he didn’t know what we were talking about. He left to go check the charts and came back to say that he didn’t see any kind of report showing these results. We scurried through our “white binder” trying to make some sense of the past few weeks and remember exactly what test was performed to show the results and the dates. Was it a CT scan, MRI, ultrasound?? I couldn’t remember! We began to get even more frustrated wondering why we were the ones having to find this information. Finally, the nurse came back and said that the info was in the charts and I did in fact have a PE. The anesthesiologist doc explained to us that we could not move forward with surgery until we were sure that the PE had shrunk in size or that it was completely gone.
If we went into surgery with this then it could cause some serious complications. So now, here we were at 7pm -- 6 hours past my scheduled surgery time and we were just now finding this out!! Why didn’t they check into this sooner! The game plan is now to have another CT scan tomorrow morning to find out the status of the clot in my lung. If the clot is still prominent, then I will have to spend more time using the anticoagulants to thin the blood. This could be over several days. If the clot is small enough, then we can move forward with the surgery tomorrow afternoon. I am completely drained after today. It is very difficult to prepare mentally for an operation such as this and then to be put on hold for hours not knowing what the next steps are, and then being told that we may or may not have surgery tomorrow. I am just now finding out that they are using a contrast die for the scan…I am allergic to the dye which means that I will have to have a steroid prep that takes 12-24 hours! So basically now I may be looking at getting surgery the day after tomorrow???? Aaaah! I guess I’ll be finding out within the next short while if I will need the contrast dye or if they will be doing the test without it.
I found this video that explains a good portion of the surgery that I will undergo today. To view copy and paste this link
http://www.spine-health.com/video/lumbar-corpectomy-surgery-video
Here is a link explaining the first part of surgery: thoracotomy
http://www.webmd.com/hw-popup/lung-surgery-thoracotomy