September 17, 2011
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The Patient’s Perspective
Posted by Stephanie 2:00pm CST from the apartment Houston, TX
Okay. I’ve had quite the hiatus from posting (six weeks!), and at a time when I’m sure everyone wants to know what’s going on. Sorry for that, it’s just been really important for me to focus on healing and not worry about anything else.
So, by now you’ve probably all had a chance to read Sammy’s post about the outcome of surgery. I’m sure you can figure out from that post that the results were much, MUCH better than we could have imagined, but I’d like to retell the events of that day from my perspective, and maybe get more into medical detail than he did.
We arrived at the hospital bright and early (5:15am-ouch!) and Sammy accompanied me back to the pre-surgery holding pen, where I got to don my awesome hospital gown, anti-embolism stockings and paper shower cap thingy. At least a half a dozen people stopped in to ask the same questions—nurses, anesthesiologists, even a hospital chaplain. Then it was time to have an extra I.V. line started, get marked on (cutting into the correct side would be important), be given a shot of Ativan to stay relaxed, etc.
Eventually I had to bid Sammy farewell so I could get wheeled back to the operating room. Back there it seems chaotic, though I’m sure it’s a controlled chaos—people scurrying about, calling out instructions and setting up equipment.
I scooted myself onto the surgical table and had to sit up while they put in the epidural. By that point, the Ativan had kicked in, so it’s all a little fuzzy, but I do barely remember laying back and having an oxygen mask put over my face before I drifted off.The next thing I know, someone’s pulling out the tube from my throat (very unpleasant, by the way—I haven’t been conscious enough in the past to remember that part), and immediately I realize I’m in horrible pain. My shoulder. That pesky left shoulder has caused problems after every chest surgery (thanks to the way it’s positioned for several hours during surgery), and this time was no different. I was vaguely aware of machines beeping and things being shouted, but I could only concentrate on my own labored breathing and painful groans. My body’s reaction to pain is hard chills—my teeth start chattering and I visibly shake and shiver. The nurses, of course, took that to mean I was cold, and started piling on blankets, but I was finally able to get out a few words to let them know what was really going on.
It felt like forever before they were able to get the pain under control. In reality, it was two shots of morphine and probably a half hour. Once things had calmed down, I was able to better assess how I felt. Dry mouth (hooray for ice chips), fuzzy feeling brain, super sore, but I noticed I could breathe fairly easily. That was when I started to freak out. See, usually the surgeon is right there (literally, right in my face) when I wake up after surgery to give me the lowdown, but this time, Dr. Swisher was nowhere to be found. Maybe that was because of the pain episode that erupted right when I woke up, or maybe he had somewhere else to be at that time, but there I was, lying in a hospital bed with absolutely no idea how surgery went. We were told before surgery that if the hilar mass was removable, they would most likely have to take a lobe of lung with it. Did the fact that I could breathe fairly well mean that they opened me up, realized they couldn’t get it, and closed me right back up? My brain started trying to figure things out, but I couldn’t even see a clock to know how long I had been under, and the nurse in the recovery unit couldn’t answer any of my questions about the outcome of surgery.
Finally, Dr. Swisher and his team made an appearance (I later learned that was about two hours after waking up in the recovery unit). By the time he showed up, I was having a full-blown internal meltdown, having imagined the worst-case scenario, so when he spoke the words, “I think I have pretty good news”, I nearly passed out in relief. He went on to explain that when he got in there, instead of finding a mass (which looked part fluid-filled and part solid on the scans), it looked as though the suspected lymph node was almost non-existent (destroyed by chemo). In it’s place was what he called a pseudo-aneurysm—a bulging blood vessel in the location of the previous mass that had grown and looked on the scans like our cancer bad guy. He said he fixed that (along with repairing a gap in one of my ribs from a previous surgery with a small prosthetic piece), but didn’t see much that looked like tumor. He did take some of the surrounding tissue to be checked. He also mentioned that he wasn’t sure I would need radiation after all, but that we’d have to wait for the pathology report to be sure.
If I could’ve jumped for joy, I would have. Just a few minutes after Dr. Swisher came by, Sammy showed up, and the smile on his face matched my feeling of overwhelming relief. He, mom, and Ang (who visited after he left), had an equally rough day sitting in the waiting room on edge, unsure of what they were going to hear. Lucky for them, they found out the good news quite awhile before I did!
The next couple of hours in the PACU (post-anesthesia care unit) were a blur. I slept, had another pain episode, ate a LOT of ice chips, and eventually got wheeled up to my room. I slept most of the rest of that day away, but did have to do some breathing treatments during the night, and they had me sitting up and walking around the floor fairly soon.
The rest of my hospital stay was pretty uneventful. Another couple of teeth-chattering, shaking pain episodes—the epidural, though it controlled the pain of my incision area quite well, didn’t do anything for my shoulder. I spent a day only on ice chips, another with just clear liquids, and then I was finally able to eat solid food. Just a couple of days after surgery I was already doing several laps around the nurses station, and about day four, the fluid output from my chest tube was low enough for it to be pulled (along with that miserable catheter—I hate that thing more than any other part of surgery!!). On day five, I was released from the hospital, and mom, Ang and I (Sammy left a couple days after surgery to be back at school) came back to the apartment, where we built a pillow fortress for me to be propped up on the next few days.
After just a few short days at the apartment (and ten days after surgery), we flew home to continue my recovery. That’s sooner that I’ve usually tried to travel after surgery, but 1) I wanted to be home ASAP to recuperate there, and 2) it was coming up on my birthday! They were a rough couple of flights to get home, but boy was I glad when I got there!
Alright, I’m stopping this post here—it’s rather lengthy already, and there’s still so much to share. I’ll get started on the next post, which will cover the rest of my recovery at home, plus my recent return to Houston and the next step in my treatment process. Stay tuned!!
-Steph
