Surgery Day Switched!
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.
We value and respect the experiences of all of our HERWriters, but everyone is different. Many of our writers are speaking from personal experience, and what's worked for them may not work for you. Their articles are not a substitute for medical advice although we hope you can gain knowledge from their insight.
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