Surgical skirmishes

Picture this.  No don't.  Just follow along; it will be graphic enough.

The evening I checked into the hospital, they gave me a third purge.  This is when you drink a perfectly abominable salt-tasting concoction -- 2 litres of it -- and then sit on the toilet until "everything runs clear."

So, there I am -- sitting -- when someone comes into the room, calls out and I call back.  And the bathroom door opens.  (Why do they have doors on hospital bathrooms?  Anyone?)

It's my surgeon and he'd like to know if I can take a 90-second break, so that he can mark me up for surgery.  Teeth clenched, I say, "No."  He thinks for a moment and then kneels in front of me, pauses to read my T-shirt -- "Behind every successful woman, there is usually a rather talented cat" -- nods, lifts the shirt and begins to draw with black marker.  "Will this stay on through my three showers?", I ask, cool-like.  "No problem," he says, rises and leaves.

Gheesh!

When he came around on the day after surgery, I asked, "Did you say you got the tumour, the ovaries, and the uterus and I don't have a pouch"?  "Yes," he said.  "That's what I thought you said,", I said, but I didn't believe it."  "Neither did I, he said."

Better a great underconfident surgeon than a mediocre overconfident one, I say.

To my great disappointment, he didn't take out my appendix.  "It is normal procedure," he explained, "but only when things are optimal" -- which answered a dozen other questions.  Optimal is when they get it all and can clean up.  Sub-optimal" or Incomplete is when there remains 2 cm of tumour.  I got this out of the booklet from the hospital cancer library.

Not that I'm disappointed at being sub-optimal.  It beats dead and leaves a lot of room for improvement.  And no doubt 5 1/2 hours in the operating room was enough.  The booklet says 6 hours is the limit.  I'd have liked to have lost the appendix, though.