one week and now I'm counting...

One week from today I will under go my total knee replacement. I don't watch a lot of hospital dramas but I do think of House and the certain progression from a small hangnail to a life threatening condition, all escalating because the staff is just experimenting on the patient.

My main concern for this type of surgery is that they operate on the correct leg. It is my LEFT knee. On my shoulder, I believe, they wrote on each side: "NO" on the good side and cryptic messages on the one they were to cut.

When I was at the doctor last week, they xrayed both knees. He found that one of the images had been mis-labeled as "right" when it was the "left". He said that the xray person would be responsible for relabeling and they would have to file an incident. This prompted me to phone the surgeon's nurse to remind her that this had happened and needed to be corrected. I should follow up with an email so that I have it in writing. The discovery was prompted by my mentioning that I had broken the femur on the left leg when I was 10 years old. He could see the scar tissue on the xray but the image was labeled "right".

This led me to thinking that once I became aware that an error had occurred, it was my responsibility to ensure that it was corrected. I see this as a karma kind of thing. Too often we want to say "everything will be all right" but once we become aware, I believe good karma puts us in charge of following through the situation. Karma may be the wrong word but it is a kind of non-logical, non-intellectual thing that I have no other word for at the moment.

anticipation grows...

...and turns to anxiety and nervousness. I'm still able to have enthusiasm for the outcome but the reality of the cutting and the discomfort and the scariness are coming to the fore. I guess that's unavoidable and I do know what I'm getting into so there is no hiding from that. My other surgery experiences have set me up nicely for this one -- none have been bad but I am familiar with the turmoil and the uncertainty of the march up to the merciful oblivion.

I am understanding that my oblivion will be controlled differently this time. My mental numbness will occur with something (not sure exactly what) that will make me sleepy. The body numbness will occur through an epidural and then a femoral block. I need to look them up. In this way, the area undergoing surgery will be singled out for numbing and the rest of the body should be free from the heavy drugs. Respiratory anesthesia has caused me intense nausea in the past so I'm hoping to avoid that this time. The shoulder surgeries I had used a nerve block that made the entire shoulder and arm seem to be removed from the body and lasted a full 24 hours.

I am somewhat disturbed that I will stay overnight in the hospital. The doctors say the average stay is three days and I am hoping that I will get out before that. I will be in an orthopedic ward at Northwestern where Eric will have guest privileges overnight! I'm not sure how they make that out to sound like a good thing but they do.