Surgery: it's Tensions Terrors and Traumas. I am home.

First things first:

I am well, at home, learning to eat again - harder than you might imagine- and feeling okay.

Never bury the lead is a guiding principle of journalism, never keep the audience in the dark about the key issue, the key revelation, the key truth. I survived surgery. Relatively speaking, I have survived well and while the trip is by no means done, the journey for now seems so much more navigable. We always want the latest step to be the definitive one, the piece of the puzzle that turned things around but health doesn't really work like that and cancer doesn't really get solved like that.

Strangely enough making it into Hamilton for surgery on the 16th of February was more difficult than most of the other steps in this medical drama. When we left the house it was the early moments of a blizzard that made the normally easy trip harsh, tense and worrying. As Debi said as the car slid slightly as every bit of the surface seemed buried in ice, snow, or a nasty mix of the two, there is no point in getting killed in a car accident on the way to potentially life-saving surgery.

The surgery itself was 'complicated but routine.' And long. Debi had to deal with the anxiety and uncertainty of an operation that ran longer than expected, with doctors who were less clear than they needed to be about how things went. I was the lucky one, under an anesthetic, unaware of just how much time was passing.

Snowstorms, a shortage of real information, medical people being oblique or circumspect were just the things that happened that day to Debi, reminding me yet again of how little we acknowledge the intense and incredible strain illnesses put on others, not just on the one who is sick.

Complicated but routine translates into being opened up and having a section of the esophagus and the stomach cut out and then reshaping the stomach and what remains of the esophagus into a new functioning whole. The esophagus, the breathing tube, the aorta, part of the lymphatic glands all come together in sections and in my case the surgeon was surprised by just how close the aorta and esophagus, especially the part that needed to be excised. were. Cutting out the one while missing entirely the other was part of the reason the surgery took so long. At the end of the procedure, everything is closed up, everyone believing, hoping, praying that what needed to be removed had been so.

Once I did wake up, there was pain - lots of pain - grogginess, and tubes...tubes everywhere. Tubes that took stuff out of me, tubes that put stuff in me, tubes that let the medical team monitor me. Tubes that were necessary and at the same time made me feel and appear very ill. In addition to finding the most apt pain management system, there was the whole thing about not taking anything by mouth for a week, Over time the tubes came out, the pain became manageable, not taking things by mouth became slightly tedious and my medical team kept telling me how well I was doing. So ten days after checking in, I checked out and, on a much nicer, though still slightly snowy, day, Debi drove me home.

At home the tedium of recuperation sets in. Change and improvement are incremental and by no means unidirectional. Some days the eating is a charm, some days the diarrhea nearly intolerable, not to mention deeply embarrassing. The drowsiness seems to be abating, the energy seems to be returning, the pain today is less than yesterday but we are still only days into what was described a a 4 to 6 week process and the human impulse is to want it to all be better now.

But the top line is that I am home, I have survived complicated, difficult surgery and there is every reason to believe that things are on the mend, if I can borrow and twist one more cliche.

 

Once More into the Breech or how I contemplate yet again major surgery

There was a period, a short period, of about a year and a half when I just figured I was all done with this. There is an old Irish truism, made deeply popular by Woody Allen, about never telling God your plans. 

I don't like hospitals. I don't like surgery. I don't like contemplating either. And yet, here I am in the winter of 2016 doing just that. I wanted sun and heat and instead I am getting the extremely bright lights of an operating theatre and the less then soothing sounds of a hospital ward.  

On Tuesday, the 16th of February I have to check in at St. Joseph's Hospital in Hamilton at 6:00 AM for surgery that will begin at 8:00 AM. My surgeon and the team will excise part of my esophagus and part of my stomach, reshape the whole thing, stitch it back together and, all things being equal, I will be rid of this cancer. 

I spent much of Tuesday listening to Nurses, Anesthesiologists, Physiotherapists explain how it was all going to work and making sure that I understood that for the first seven days post-surgery I would take nothing by mouth...nothing...not a sip of water, not an ice chip...nothing. Everything comes to you through a tube: protein, carbs, vitamins and everything else a body might need. See if you stitch up the inside of the esophagus, you've got to let the stitches heal without getting wet. One concern was whether I'd get bored. I assured them that getting bored isn't something I do. If I can spend a year on my back I can spend a week without putting anything into my mouth. That's week one. 

Then I learn to eat all over again. I figure if I can conquer walking, I can learn to eat. Just have to learn to eat less, in smaller meals, more often. I have to learn that there are foods I probably will never eat again and I have to learn to adjust. Apparently, there was a time when doctors and patients believed that this surgery and the impact it had on eating was the worst possible thing you could do. But I was pleased to discover that someone actually did a study on what people who'd had the surgery really thought and it seems this is not the soul destroying outcome some people believe it might be. Seriously, we are talking surgery to remove a cancer with great outcomes...how could I not do this?

That still leaves my deep set-in-the bone distaste for hospitals and surgery. That still leaves my cellular level objection to anesthetics. It is not a personal thing...I like doctors and nurses and physiotherapists. I literally owe my life to them. But that deep gratitude doesn`t mean I wouldn`t rather restrict my encounters with them to cocktail parties. If I could avoid next Tuesday, avoid it in any real practical sense I would in an instant.

One thing I have learned is that there are real things you need to do in life to survive. Sometimes, a lot of the time, that means doing things your very soul screams out NO against. So on Tuesday, the rock of my life Debi, will drive us to Hamilton and I will check in at 6:00 AM for an operation that is scheduled to begin at 8:00 AM. 

Assuming the hospital WiFi works and the pain levels are manageable, and of course assuming the dietitian has allowed at least one hit of coffee to be mixed in with the food fluid bag, I might even blog about the day come next Wednesday.