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hysterectomy day
Tuesday, October 17 2017
location: room 509, Ramada Inn, Albany, NY
Gretchen couldn't eat or even drink this morning, but I had some toast and coffee in the Ramada breakfast dining area. When we went out to the car, we found frost on the windshield, the first frost we'd seen since springtime. Of course, we were about a degree north of Hurley (and thus about 2% closer to the North Pole), and it turned out that there had not been a frost down there.
At the hospital, we were directed to a series of reception desks, and at the last of these, Gretchen filled out some paperwork and was whisked off to the pre-op procedures. I waited for awhile out in the waiting area until I was told I could come back to see Gretchen. She was in a hospital gown with a port in each arm, lying on a hospital bed. A parade of staff came through, many of them asking the same questions: what was her name, her date of birth, her surgeon, and what was the procedure that was to be done on her. She always answered with matter-of-fact articulation, which perhaps might not be all that common among surgery patients, at least based on the reactions this caused. One of these was the surgeon himself, who, when I asked about it, showed me a picture of the laparoscopic robot on his phone. It looked like some sort of mechanical spider from 20 years in the future, with multiple arms that could enter a body from different directions. (For some reason I'd been picturing multiple tiny roach-sized robots controlled by bluetooth.) To one of the interns, Gretchen asked if it would be possible for there to be a photo taken of her uterus as it was removed. The surgeon had thought this request weird, but she said she'd try.
When Gretchen was rolled off to surgery, I was told to wait in a different waiting room downstairs with all of Gretchen's stuff. I was able to do a little work on my laptop, though the inconvenience of having to work with one screen on a complex task involving the git code repository system made the whole thing painful. Eventually I relocated out to a round metal table in the high-ceilinged front of the hospital, near a small Starbucks coffee stand. There at least I had a table and a source of caffeine (they make a good soy cappuccino), though the low-angle October sun streaming through the window made me hot and washed out the details on my laptop's screen, and (this being St. Peter's hospital), there was an unnecessarily loud television bolted to the wall overhead. I'd forgotten to bring my TV-B-Gone.
My buzzer went off, so I hurried back to the waiting room. There I met the surgeon, who said the procedure had gone well. He said he'd found infection was also present in Gretchen's appendix, and he'd snipped that out while he was in there.
After that, I waited in the nearby waiting area. Eventually Gretchen's parents arrived after flying up from National Airport to Albany. They'd bought hummus wraps at Trader Joes, and I ate one immediately (it was surprisingly flavorless, despite the presence of red onions). We still had hours to wait, which we spent by reading (Gretchen's parents) or working (me). Fortunately, the teevee in this particular waiting room had a volume control that was reachable by someone standing nearby, so Gretchen's father was able to silence it, upsetting nobody.
At some point, my buzzer buzzed, and this time the receptionist offered me a phone so I could talk to Gretchen. She sounded groggy but content. But still we weren't allowed to go up and see her.
When we were at last allowed to see Gretchen, she'd been moved to a room not far from where she'd been a month before. This time, though, the room only had space for one bed, and there would be no roommate. (White privilege?) Gretchen was still groggy and not yet uncomfortable. She even took a few nibbles at a spinach pastry we'd bought last night at the Honest Weight Food Co-op. At some point, though, she thought she was strong enough to stand up, but standing up proved to be a mistake. She was hit by a wave of nausea and had to lie back down. She also became aware of a deeply uncomfortable pain in her neck, as if she'd wrenched it (perhaps while unconscious on the operating table). The neck pain alone caused her to order narcotic pain medication, which eventually returned her to a state of comfortable numbness. At that point, she started eating again, focusing on the linguine with meatballs from Honest Weight. I found it impossible to do any work with the distraction of all the conversation, the nurses taking vitals, and even a student in a community college nursing program doing a protracted exam. So I mostly read from the book I'd started yesterday, Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction. Occasionally I'd read a fact so mind-blowing that I'd have to tell the others. For example, the University of Phoenix (a for-profit online university) spends over $2000/student on marketing but less than $900/student on education. Furthermore, a University of Phoenix credential on a resume has been shown to be worth no more than a high school diploma. Like other exploitative for-profit universities (Trump "University" comes to mind), the University of Phoenix preys on the desperate and the ignorant, who are don't know enough to check the claims of made in online advertising.
[REDACTED]
Eventually Gretchen's parents headed off to their hotel, and I hung around long enough for Gretchen to get her next round of medication. She also tried to stand for a second or third time, but it ended again with her almost throwing up. With her catheter removed at 6:00pm, she was either going to have to start walking or use a bedpan. She ended up having to use a bedpan later, after I left.
On the drive home to Hurley from the hospital, I stopped at the Sunoco gas station on the corner of Whitehall and Delaware to buy some beer for the long drive on the Thruway. The selection was a throwback to a simpler time, when people drank Natty Ice (which is what Natural Ice actually calls itself now) and Busch. There were no microbrews for sale at all, and certainly nothing with appreciable hop content. So I settled on a Blue Moon Belgian White, which is the kind of beer one buys for a girlfriend who does not like beer. I think the reason the beer selection was so odd was that this was a largely-minority neighborhood, where there is little demand for IPAs and the like.
My Android GPS was confused by the stop at the gas station and didn't update my position until it was too late, and I found myself heading north from the south end of I-787. I took the first available U-turn and headed back, cursing the complexity of roads near that Sunoco.
Back at the house, I smoked some pot and drank some more, ultimately staying up and watching episode 5 of the first season of Mr. Robot. This was the first episode that seemed genuinely clever to me, since it focused on human personality faults and how they act essentially as software vulnerabilities, at least as hackable as any poorly-considered encryption algorithm.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?171017 feedback
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