Back among the living

Before

I am alive and back among the land of the living. Thank you for your prayers.

Monday was a long day...a L-O-N-G day.

We arrived at the hospital around 7AM as we had be instructed. After I checked in, I met with my pre-op nurse and changed into my "fetching" gown. Then they sent me over to Nuclear Medicine so they could locate the lymph nodes that needed to be removed for testing. This special x-ray took over an hour to do because once the special dye was injected in my ear (ouch!) then x-rays were taken every ten minutes to see where the dye traveled. The process worked just as it needed to and the lymph nodes in my neck where identified as the sentinel nodes.

I missed my 10:30AM surgery time because spent 20 minutes laying on a stretcher outside Nuc. Med. waiting to be wheeled back to pre-op. So, I waited with Pastormac for the next available time. We met with my surgeon who made the "official" mark (which was huge) on my ear. The nurse put my IV in and the anesthesiologist explained to us what she had planned.

Then around 12:30PM it was finally time to go. The anesthesiologist gave me a dose of "good stuff" (her words) to relax me and it took all of about 30 seconds to put my lights out. I barely had time to kiss Pastormac before I was unconscious.

I'm told the surgery went well. My surgeon was able to get a good sample of lymph nodes and he was also able to take the larger portion of my ear without having to use a skin graft. I tried to wake up near the end and so required another dose of anesthesia before it was through. This made it extremely hard for me to wake up afterwards and a process that normally takes about 40 minutes took two hours. And I felt pretty yucky when I finally did wake up. The post-op nurse called it "anesthesia hang-over" and boy did I have it bad! Nausea, & disorientation. I was finally released at 6PM and we came home so I could go to bed. We arrived home around 7PM. It felt good to be home.

I spent the rest of Monday night and most of the day on Tuesday laying in bed still getting over the anesthesia and recovering from the surgery. Luckily I did not experience very much pain.

Today (Wednesday) I've felt mostly like myself again although it doesn't take much to make me feel run down. We were allowed to remove the bandages and "check the damage." I have quite a bit of numbness through my ear and neck area. The incision on my neck is about an 1.5 inches and my neck is pretty bruised and sore. My ear - ugh; it's going to take some getting used to. I'll be happy when the swelling goes down and all the stitches come out because right now I think it looks pretty bad. I'm reassured by my family that my ear doesn't look as bad as I think. Today was just a really sad day for me.

Hopefully by tomorrow we will get word about whether there was cancer found in the lymph node samples. For now I'm meditating on 2 Corinthians 4.


After