The Day of Surgery (Part Two)

Well, it looks like there will actually be three parts (or more!) to this. I suppose that I remember a bit more than I anticipated.  As always, thanks for reading!

The long walk ended in a pair of heavy, double doors. The officer jogged ahead of us, his keys jingling loudly, and pressed the large, metal button on the wall. The doors swung open slowly, and revealed a large area with an unmanned nurses’ station and several beds separated by curtains. “Helloooo?” the officer said as he gently placed a clipboard with my chart in it on the station desk. He looked at us, a little embarrassed, and walked around the corner. We could hear him chatting with someone for a few moments as we stood awkwardly in the doorway.

He reappeared with a tall, blond nurse that I recognized from my last visit to this hospital - Jill. She had cared for me when I was here for my endoscopy a month earlier. She and I had got along very well – she was funny and reminded very much of Lisa Kudrow. She gave me a huge smile and bobbed her head in the direction she and the officer had come from. “Let’s get you prepped!” she said with a smile.

She escorted me to a curtained-off area with a bed, a chair, and the usual accouterments of a hospital room – blood pressure cuffs, oxygen tubing, and bio-hazard sharps container. She pointed to the hospital gown and the pair of rubber-grip socks on the bed and instructed me to take off everything I had on and put them on. I nodded as she pulled the curtain closed and I began to undress. Never have I
felt so naked. My husband was smiling at me reassuringly.

When I picked up and unfolded the hospital gown I knew that it was far too small – a usual problem for me. Everything seems to be too small. I tried, sheepishly, to get it on and it covered exactly half of me. My husband found a blanket for me and then called out to the nurse. He poked his head out of the curtained area and explained the issue to her. I heard her jog off and return with another gown. My husband thanked her, turned towards me, and beckoned for me to turn around. I heard him chuckle a little at the sight of my naked ass. I glared over my shoulder at him with a faux anger that only made him chuckle harder as he helped me pull the gown on.  He tried, with great difficulty, to figure out how to tie the things up before feebly tying a few strings and calling it good.

I sat down and pulled the yellow, rubber-grip bottomed socks on. They were really tight around the ankles – I had some pretty severe swelling, especially around my left ankle. I pulled them down my ankle just a bit so that they would not feel so tight, and laid back in the bed, pulling the blanket over me. Nurse Jill returned a few moments later with a cart full of equipment. She asked me a series of questions, many of them repeats from the admittance questions, but with the addition of health background related questions. Between hospital visits and doctors’ visits the past few months I had answered this type of questionnaire so many times that the answers are automatic.

After the questionnaire she took my vitals – my temperature and blood pressure were perfect. She apologetically informed me that she would need to get my IV started.  I smiled weakly and nodded; getting blood drawn or putting an IV in me was always a chore, even for the most experienced nurses. Nurse Jill had done it successfully last time on the second try, so I had confidence in her. As she gathered the tubes and needle I went down the hall to the rest room to take a urine test – the anesthesiologist required me to take a pregnancy test before the surgery.

When I returned Nurse Jill was still fumbling about with various tubes and packages. My husband was sitting in the chair, visibly uncomfortable, and eyeing the needle packs with unease; he hated needles even more than I did. I sat back down on the bed and watched Nurse Jill open the needle pack, setting aside with other IV equipment on a steel tray on her cart. She smiled and chatted with me as she tied my left wrist off with a big purple tourniquet. As she gently pressed and smacked my hand looking for a suitable vein I stared at her scrubs, trying to find a neutral place to focus my gaze that was not on my soon-to-be penetrated hand. I noticed how scuffed her clogs were, and I noticed the imprint of an iron on her blue scrub pants. I smiled to myself; this was my kind of person – scatterbrained and a little messy, but with a good heart.

She popped her bubblegum loudly as she continued to search for a vein, moving from place to place; arm to arm. She inserted the needle three different times, each time groaning and sighing; once she said that she couldn't get it to “thread right”. Finally she resigned. She told me she was going to let the other nurse give it a try because she was afraid of messing up my veins. She apologized profusely and was obviously disappointed, but I made some passing joke that
made her smile before she wandered off to find her co-worker.

I felt a twinge of nausea; I think my husband did, too. He was looking at me a little wide-eyed, but with sympathy. He shifted in his seat and crossed his arms. His eyes were so red; he must have been rubbing them. I could tell he was exhausted. I suggested that he go home and get some rest and he rolled his eyes and shook his head. I continued to suggest that he go home, but Nurse Jill must have overhead me. She poked her head in and said that of course he was not going to go home; that would be ridiculous, and for me to drop it. He seemed to agree with that sentiment, though I could tell that part of him really wished that he could find a place to curl up and nap for a while.