Thanks for all of your kind messages. I am home now, moderately drugged, consuming more chocolate pudding than probably is wise for me. (Chocolate pudding is the best medicine, after all.)

I'd like to say at the outset that I've been very impressed with Dr. Comic Book Guy, with Oregon City Orthopedics, and with Willamette Falls Hospital during this entire process. The latter two are a bit poor at transmitting information to me, but perhaps I'm also poor at requesting information. Everything else has been great: the staff of each organization has been pleasant and helpful, and the care exemplary. Because of this, things have gone much smoother than I had anticipated.

I suspect that there are others out there who need surgery, or will need surgery in the future, and who have no idea what they're in for. I certainly had little clue what to expect; I've rarely been to a hospital, and never in my adult life. Perhaps this entry will help others know what to expect, remove some of the anxiety. It's going to be boring, though, if you don't want to know every detail of the surgery.

Kris and I arrived at the hospital at 6 a.m. As instructed, I'd had nothing to eat or drink since the middle of the previous evening. I was a bundle of nerves; my stomach was upset and my mind was racing.

At 6:30 we were shown to the surgery admitting area. There a nurse did standard nurse things: weighed me, took my temperature (with an amazing instant-read ear thermometer — wow!), and asked nursey questions. Actually, throughout the course of the morning, I was asked the same questions repeatedly, which is good: built in safe-guards. ("No, I'm not allergic to any medications. That I know of.", etc.)

We were ushered to a private room where another nurse asked nursey questions. She gave me an open-in-the-back gown (which, she explained, is open in the back because sometimes, coming out of anesthesia, a patient loses control of bodily functions, and they'd rather the patient soiled the hospital linen instead of their clothing — I hadn't known that), and tucked my bag of belongings and my crutches under the bed. She gave Kris a stack of paperwork (which I still haven't read) and had me climb onto the gurney. She placed a thin but heavy blanket over me. She took my blood pressure. "A little nervous?" she asked. My blood pressure was 170/90!

Soon another nurse appeared and wheeled me down to the pre-op room, a sort of gathering space for many different patients, each of us separated by curtains. Still another nurse appeared. She asked me nursey questions, of course, but she also started the IV (which involved no pain at all — it's the first IV I've ever had, and somehow I expected pain). Then, she shaved a large portion of my right leg with an electric shaver.

"It took me thirty-four years to grow that hair," I told her.

She wasn't as amused as I thought she should be. "It'll grow back," she said.

Next the anesthesiologist appeared, a kind and quiet man, very pleasant. He asked me if I'd like a general anesthetic (one which would put me to sleep) or a local anaesthetic (one which would be injected into my spine, causing the lower half of my body to fall asleep). I asked him to explain the pros and cons of both. (Most of my friends who at offered advice seemed to indicate that the general anesthetic was riskier, was more likely to make me sick.) The only significant differences, in my mind, were that the general anaesthetic required that a tube be placed down my throat during the surgery, while the local anesthetic would take several hours to wear off. (The general anesthetic has a short duration, and is administered via the tube-in-the-throat. When the tube is removed, it doesn't take long for the anesthetic to wear off.)

After much waffling, I opted for the general anesthetic.

I asked what was in the IV. "It's just an antibiotic," the anesthesiologist told me, but I suspect there may have been a sedative in it as well. Soon after the IV was administered, my case of nerves subsided, and I felt very comfortable.

The surgeon arrived, and reviewed the procedure with us, then Kris kissed me good-bye and headed for work. Two nurses appeared, but they didn't ask me nursey questions. They wheeled me down a hall to large, cold room filled with all sorts of instruments and, more ominously, shiny silver implements. I was transferred from my gurney to a narrow table. The nurses (there were more now; they seemed to be replicating!) attached small platforms on which I placed my arms.

Ouch! "The IV hurts!" I said. The anesthesiologist explained that he was administering a narcotic. Somebody placed an oxygen mask over my face. I glanced around...

...I grogged awake.

A nurse was asking me questions. The clock on the wall said ten o'clock. My right leg was in a brace, and the nurse was showing me some cooling device. I faded off again. I woke. I faded off. I woke. For 45 minutes, I floated on the edge of consciousness. It was strange.

The nurse asked me to rate my pain on a scale from zero to ten. I rated it a two. A different nurse (the supply seemed endless; nurses are like stormtroopers) wheeled me to a private recovery room. To my finger she clipped a little doo-hicky that measured my pulse (120!) and the oxygen saturation of my blood. When the oxygen saturation dropped below 92% (which it did when I started to doze off), an alarm sounded. "Breathe," the nurse told me. She took my blood pressure: 150 over something. "That's pretty high," she said.

She fed me saltine crackers, one by one, and held a cup of Sprite from which I sipped with a straw. After a dozen saltines (and three graham crackers), she brought me two Vicodin (at 11:15).

"How's the pain?" she asked.

"About a three," I said.

The oxygen saturation alarm sounded. "Breathe," she said.

She called Tony to come to the hospital, and he arrived just before noon. I spent my time groggily staring at the wall. Staring at the wall and itching my nose. For some reason, my nose and face itched like crazy. The nurse assured me this was a product of the anesthesia. Who would have thought?

After Tony arrived, the nurse began to give instructions. My first follow-up appointment with the surgeon is a week from Friday, and until then I'm not allowed to shower (much to Kris' dismay — "Parts of you stink already!"). She showed us how to use the brace, a nearly-full leg device that holds the knee rigidly at zero degrees of rotation. (There are dials on the side of the brace which can be used to offer greater range of motion, if needed.) The brace is called a cryocuff, and she demonstrated how ice-water can be pumped through a reservoir and into the brace, providing pressure and cooling to the knee. She arranged for a continuous passive motion machine to be delivered to the house. She told us this stuff, but it mostly made little sense to me. Fortunately, Tony listened well and later relayed the information to Kris.

At 12:30, the nurse showed me how to get out of bed, how to get upon the crutches. I took a couple of tentative steps, but suddenly I felt hot and cold all at once, I began to sweat. I felt horribly nauseated. "You'd better sit down," she said, helping me back on the gurney. "You're about to faint." She took two cold towels and draped them on my forehead and neck. She resumed an IV drip (it hadn't been activated since 10:00, when I returned to consciousness). I felt better.

At 2:00, I tried to walk again and this time had no problem. They brought me a wheelchair, and pushed me to the parking lot. I scooched into the backseat of Tony's car. As we began to travel, I felt nauseated again, but after he rolled down all of the windows and I closed my eyes, things were fine.

Tony and Kris set me up on the love seat, and Tony went to the store to by me chocolate pudding (which I was craving — thanks, little brother!). I felt fine. No pain, no nausea.

Mac stopped to visit, and so did Dave. Joel, Jeremy, and Tiff called to check on me. Thanks, guys!

At 4:00, a young man showed up with the continuous passive motion machine. This difficult-to-describe device has a cradle in which the user rests his leg. Settings are input via a wired remote control. When activated, the machine very slowly flexes the knee to a predefined angle and then back again. For three hours, my leg was in this machine, flexing to twenty degrees and back to zero, twenty degrees and back to zero.

It was only at about 7:00 p.m. that my knee began to hurt such that I'd rate it more than a three on the hospital's pain scale. The effects of some hospital-induced drug had begun to dissipate, I guess. Just a few minutes ago, at ten, I had Kris give me another Vicodin, just two hours, forty-five minutes since my previous dose. (I'm supposed to take one every four hours, or as the pain indicates.) My pain had reached a five, and rather than wait for it to increase, I decided to treat it early.

Kris has been great today, very caring and loving, the perfect nurse.

Tomorrow I begin exercises (leg lifts, ankle twists), and I'll spend more time in the continuous passive motion machine. I'll also spend lots of time reading!

I hope this information proves useful to random googlers in the future, helps alleviate the fears of somebody else who's going to have his or her first surgery. If you have questions, feel free to leave a comment, and I'll do my best to answer.

On this day at foldedspace.org

2001 — New Horizons   If a person limits his or her reading material to science fiction and fantasy (or some other genre), is the person somehow less educated, somehow cutting himself (or herself) off from possible horizons?