Surgery


This will be long and detailed, and a little graphic, so maybe I should start with a headline. A million years or so ago I was a journalist and did headlines, and they are cool little puzzles. Capture the piece; make it sound interesting; don't split infinitives or prepositional phrases at the end of the line; try to fit it into the column but don't be slavish about it; try to use active voice. I suppose there are many more rules; I think I made these up. Didn't go to J-school. Anyway, for this one:


Morgan Out of Surgery and Back Home;
A Bunch of Stuff Out, But Some Aspects
Still Inconclusive and Await Pathology


And then you go into that inverted paragraph who-what-when-where-why motif and design the piece so the last graphs can be cut off. Not here; this isn't news, it's a blog.


Now. Assuming I haven't shaken you and you're still reading, here goes:


We got to Barnes around 11 am on Thursday after a lot of confusion about the starting time. It's kind of a moving target anyway; the surgeon doesn't really know how long the preceding one will take. By about 2 pm they were ready to go, explaining the drill. A short conversation with the surgeon, and a slightly longer one with the anesthesiologist. Expected to take about 5 hours, so I thought I'd come back up around 7 pm.


A friend with a great sense of the absurd suggested that I try to savor the buzz as I was going under. A good idea, had I been at Fillmore East. As it was, the last thing I remember was getting wheeled down a corridor.


Next thing I know I'm waking up and looking a clock. It says 7. But there is something odd about the light, and I feel like I have a log shoved down my throat. Turns out it was 7 am Friday morning. The surgery had gone longer and later than expected, and the doctor was worried about my breathing as I was sedated through the night. Hence the big-ass breathing tube. Believe me, they are to be avoided at all cost. I had my wrists tied to the bed to keep me from waking up and yanking it out.


Someone did come and take it out, mercifully, but then I realized I was still way tubed up. A drain from my neck - I had this before, not a big deal - and a feeding tube down my nose and into my stomach. Very unpleasant and only there because I might not be able to eat and it was better to put it in during surgery than later, through the lacerated throat. So it was, at that point, pointless. Plus a catheter. I was an ingress-egress machine.


The feeding tube became a real driver. I wanted that baby out of there, and they said it would only come out if I could demonstrate that I could get nutrition down. So I downed everything I could stand, which wasn't much. Eventually I focused on tepid milk. Twenty-four hours later it was pulled out by a pretty good-looking female doc.


The surgery had not gone exactly as planned. The concept was that (a) we would look around inside the oral cavity with a microscope, find the primary, laser it out, then (b) go and take out the remaining cancerous lymph nodes on and take them out in a neck resection. All the activity was to be on the left side of my head and neck. Turned out (a) was inconclusive, the primary cancer not seen; but the doc did spot a precancerous lesion, maybe, on the right side of the cavity and took it out. I have the feeling he wanted something to show for the effort. Apparently it was hard work, because I have a relatively small cavity, and he had navigational problems. And I always thought I had a big mouth.


So he removed a lot of vestigial tonsils (if for some reason you've been following this story, you'll remember I had my tonsils taken out, I thought, in the 1950's) and then went on to part (b) and took out a chunk of my neck on the left side. Uneventful. Now the whole mess goes to Dr. Pathology and he works his magic, looking to see if we did, in fact, find the primary. At this point, maybe. But maybe not, which will throw me back to the whole radiation/chemo possibility, which is the bad part.


Two more nights in the hospital, and nights in a hospital are just lousy. The technique seems to be not to care about uninterrupted sleep, but rather to show up every couple of hours, turn on bright lights, wheel in a device, and inject something into your veins or take blood out or take your temp or check your blood pressure, and the people who are doing it although really nice look increasing like denizens of the Star Wars Cantina as the hours go by. Which they do slowly.


Plus it was a double room, and my roommate was a very sick dude. He was five feet away, on the other side of a curtain.


I lobbied for an early release on Saturday and lost. So I became Mr. Positive, eating as much as I could, strolling around, chatting up the staff, bucking up my roommate, in order to establish my creds and get the hell out of the place. Sorry. Even though they are staffed by really nice people, I do not like hospitals. I can't shake the notions that they are giant petrie dishes and people go there to die.


This morning the docs said I was "extraordinary." So Mr. Positive got sprung.


I'm now home with just the neck drain, which is not pretty, and a Frankenstein's monster scar along the jawline, and a swelled neck, but everyone is saying I look great. Which may mean I am surrounded by flatterers, but I'll take it.


From here, taking a lot of pills, can't lift over 10 pounds, and back to waiting.