I went in for my operation last Saturday. My admission had been preceded by a couple of pre-operative assessments - one to check I was robust enough to have the surgery and one to take a blood sample purely to identify my blood type should a transfusion be required!
I arrived on the ward at 07:30, food having been denied since 02:30 and water since 06:30. I had a round of questions that seemed to be repeated over and over, the main one being am I diabetic (no, I'm not). Eventually, I was taken to a room to change into the dreaded arse-revealing hospital gown and my clothes were taken off to a ward to await my post-operative return.
In the pre-op chat with the anaethetist, we had discussed the choice between general or spinal block anaesthesia and I'd opted for the latter having twice had it when I'd had the hip replacements, so I knew the form when I was wheeled into the room outside the theatre: sit on the side of the trolley, bend over such that your chest is crushed in on itself and then "breathe normally" while the spinal shot is administered. It's then a case of getting your legs back onto the trolley before the leaden numbness kicks in below the waist. By the time I was wheeled into the theatre, my legs were well away with the fairies. In fact, I was convinced that I could 'feel' that my legs were still stretched out on the trolley whereas the evidence of my eyes told me my calves had been raised up into stirrups ready for the op.
The operation itself was less entertaining than the cystoscopy as I only got to see the back of the TV screen where all the action was happening. There seemed to be a bit of a delay at first as some piece of kit wasn't doing what it was meant to do, but when we got underway, it was fairly quick, probably about 40 minutes in total. I didn't't even take my glasses off! Op over, I was wheeled to the recovery area where, every ten minutes or so I was asked "Can you wiggle your toes?" and the answer was always in the negative. When I finally got moved out of recovery and onto to the ward, I still wasn't toe-wiggling but I could move my left leg from side-to-side by about 2cm (putting my hand under the blanket to feel my totally numbed thigh was weird - it felt like I was touching the arm of an overstuffed leather sofa!). However, recovery wanted the space for others coming out of ops but the ward had no nurses free to take the handover from recovery to ward. It was the first moment the crisis in the NHS was exposed. Getting back to the ward was the second: the guy who had administered my anaesthesia had to wheel me back to the ward as porters apparently don't work at the weekend.
The 'ward' turned out to be a private room which felt like a result until it became clear that they thought I had a risk of falling for some reason: they actually wanted me in a place where they could make sure no one else could get in my way. I didn't care: if they wanted to characterise me as doddery and the price was a private room, so be it!
Finally, at 17:00, I got some food! When I got to the ward after the op, one nurse offered me a sandwich, only for the other one to say there were none left so I made do with a cup of tea at 13:30-ish and hung on until the food was due to arrive. At 17:00 I was administered an bladder full of chemo liquid designed to get rid of any stray cancer cells and at 17:05, my food arrived. The treatment required me to lay for 15 mins on my back, 15 on my right side, 15 on the left and the final 15 on my back again. Trying to eat tea whilst ridiculously hungy but trying to adhere to the necessary body positions was (almost) funny. After I made my first turn, one of the nurses came into the room and whispered that I might want to make sure I was a bit more covered up the next time I turned: I had flashed my bum to nurses' station outside my room!
Later that evening, they came and removed my catheter and told me to pee 'normally'. This was my TWOC (trial without catheter) and, after about two hours and having produced a thimbleful of urine, I was deemed to have failed my trial and the catheter was reinserted.
The next morning around 10:30, the consultant in charge of my case came by to tell me how well the op had gone and that my dreaded catheter would be staying in for around 8 to 10 days! I was more than a bit disappointed as the period of 2 to 3 days had been mentioned and I told him this. He laughed and said that that would probably be how long it took until they phoned to arrange a date for removal. That turned out to be pretty accurate.
So, here I am, a week after the op. The catheter is coming out tomorrow and, providing I don't fail my TWOC this time (please, please, pleeeeease!), it won't be going anywhere near my nether regions any time soon. It will be another 1 to 2 weeks until the biopsy results come back by which time, we will, hopefully, be on holiday. I am grateful for the blood in my pee because I had had no other symptoms to tell me anything was wrong. I'm hoping it was a sufficiently early warning and that things have been stopped before becoming a lot more serious. Anyway, fingers crossed...
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