The gastric bypass operation took place on Friday, December 11, 2009. Pre-op was pretty uneventful. They put an IV in me, and I told the anaesthesiologist about problems I'd had before with nausea and with surpressed breathing response during recovery. My wife came into the pre-op room and checked on me, then the nurses wheeled me away.
I don't remember anything about the operation, and I don't remember much of the recovery room. I remember being groggy, and I remember having a urinary catheter and some other tubes sticking out of me. Everything else is a blur, until some point later in the day when I found myself in my hospital room.
The uneventfulness continued through Saturday until a couple of hours before my discharge from the hospital. I was still in pain, but I didn't feel like it was unusually bad pain. I remember telling a nurse that I felt like I was about to have an anxiety attack. They gave me something for it, and I calmed down shortly afterward. No one thought that anything out of the ordinary was going on.
The problem is that something very bad was happening inside of me. Things would get much, much worse within the next 24 hours.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Bad Omens
Okay, so the first doctor was a washout. Fine, just find another doctor, right? Sign up for his monthly pre-op orientation session, go, and get the ball rolling again.
It wasn't that easy.
I signed up for doctor #2's orientation session online. The class was scheduled a couple of hours before I had to go to work (I've done a 9:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. airshift for years now). I show up, and there's a note on the door - the meeting's been cancelled. No warning, no phone call, no e-mail - just cancelled, no reason given.
The next day I called the doctor's office and rescheduled things. Turns out I didn't need to go to his orientation session since I'd been to one when I was still considering doctor #1. That'll teach me to deal with a doctor over the Internet - do it by voice, so you'll know who to yell at next time.
By the latter part of 2009 I was finally getting things squared away for my bypass. I'd met the bypass doctor, got cardiac approval, had the psychiatric and other counseling done, got insurance approval, and was just waiting for a final appointment with the surgeon prior to the operation. I was in a bit of a hurry at this point since the end of the year was fast approaching and my insurance deductible would soon re-set. The Gods of Scheduling must have known this, because it seemed like there was a delay at every possible point. Even that final pre-op session with the doctor was rescheduled to another day, just hours before the appointment time.
I'd considered myself lucky to have made it through the mindfields of dealing with doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies, but contrary to how I felt, my luck was running out.
Come the day of the pre-op doctor's appointment and my wife and I were sitting in the exam room, talking with the surgeon. I was on an examination table that was rather high off the ground, and I had taken my glasses case out of my pocket and was holding them for some reason I can't recall. Somehow I managed to drop them onto the floor on the right side of the table. I bent over to retrieve them, and right as I got my arm to the floor I felt something go *POP* on the lower right-hand side of my rib cage. This was followed by a pretty good dose of pain. I had either pulled a rib cage muscle or done some damage to the cartilage between the ribs, but for some reason the surgeon didn't seem too concerned. The pain would stay with me for the next four weeks and would impede my recovery, but I didn't know that at the time.
I should have recognized right there that I'd been getting bad omens for weeks. I didn't even want to consider it, though - I was determined to get the gastric bypass, and I wasn't about to get superstitious before the operation.
Shows you what I know about superstitions, I guess.
(To be continued...)
It wasn't that easy.
I signed up for doctor #2's orientation session online. The class was scheduled a couple of hours before I had to go to work (I've done a 9:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. airshift for years now). I show up, and there's a note on the door - the meeting's been cancelled. No warning, no phone call, no e-mail - just cancelled, no reason given.
The next day I called the doctor's office and rescheduled things. Turns out I didn't need to go to his orientation session since I'd been to one when I was still considering doctor #1. That'll teach me to deal with a doctor over the Internet - do it by voice, so you'll know who to yell at next time.
By the latter part of 2009 I was finally getting things squared away for my bypass. I'd met the bypass doctor, got cardiac approval, had the psychiatric and other counseling done, got insurance approval, and was just waiting for a final appointment with the surgeon prior to the operation. I was in a bit of a hurry at this point since the end of the year was fast approaching and my insurance deductible would soon re-set. The Gods of Scheduling must have known this, because it seemed like there was a delay at every possible point. Even that final pre-op session with the doctor was rescheduled to another day, just hours before the appointment time.
I'd considered myself lucky to have made it through the mindfields of dealing with doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies, but contrary to how I felt, my luck was running out.
Come the day of the pre-op doctor's appointment and my wife and I were sitting in the exam room, talking with the surgeon. I was on an examination table that was rather high off the ground, and I had taken my glasses case out of my pocket and was holding them for some reason I can't recall. Somehow I managed to drop them onto the floor on the right side of the table. I bent over to retrieve them, and right as I got my arm to the floor I felt something go *POP* on the lower right-hand side of my rib cage. This was followed by a pretty good dose of pain. I had either pulled a rib cage muscle or done some damage to the cartilage between the ribs, but for some reason the surgeon didn't seem too concerned. The pain would stay with me for the next four weeks and would impede my recovery, but I didn't know that at the time.
I should have recognized right there that I'd been getting bad omens for weeks. I didn't even want to consider it, though - I was determined to get the gastric bypass, and I wasn't about to get superstitious before the operation.
Shows you what I know about superstitions, I guess.
(To be continued...)
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
What Came Before
Allow me to present a brief bit of backstory before I get into the tale of said disasters. I first broached the subject of a gastric bypass to my wife in the spring of 2009. She had just recovered from major surgery that had put us near our health insurance policy's catastrophic limit for the year, meaning I could get the operation and have it covered at close to 100%. She thought this was a good idea, so I began looking into the matter.
The research and scheduling process took quite a while, partly due to work schedule issues, partly due to my own procrastination, but mostly due to red tape. I had to start over at one point since the doctor I initially chose was a "participating provider" (i.e., one the insurance company would cover in full), but the hospital he worked out of was not. I finally found what I thought was the right combination of doctor and hospital, but it took most of the rest of the year to do so. The surgery was set, with only a couple of weeks to spare before a new insurance year began.
BE WARNED: If you plan on getting a bypass or any other gastric surgery, allow yourself plenty of time. You'll have to go through more screening processes than you ever thought possible, fill out enough paperwork to sink a ship, and deal with so many nurses, office assistants, and other administrative personnel you'd think you were being audited. Do yourself a favor and type out as much of your medical information as you can in advance. That way, you can just put "see attached" on the forms you'll receive.
(To be continued...)
The research and scheduling process took quite a while, partly due to work schedule issues, partly due to my own procrastination, but mostly due to red tape. I had to start over at one point since the doctor I initially chose was a "participating provider" (i.e., one the insurance company would cover in full), but the hospital he worked out of was not. I finally found what I thought was the right combination of doctor and hospital, but it took most of the rest of the year to do so. The surgery was set, with only a couple of weeks to spare before a new insurance year began.
BE WARNED: If you plan on getting a bypass or any other gastric surgery, allow yourself plenty of time. You'll have to go through more screening processes than you ever thought possible, fill out enough paperwork to sink a ship, and deal with so many nurses, office assistants, and other administrative personnel you'd think you were being audited. Do yourself a favor and type out as much of your medical information as you can in advance. That way, you can just put "see attached" on the forms you'll receive.
(To be continued...)
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