Ablation Day!

Well, yesterday was my ablation day!  I had been completely not worried about my ablation at all for the last few weeks.  Not even a little bit.  Then, the day before the ablation came and I got all sorts of jitters.  To make the jitters worse, our Internet died the second Master Pravus got home (grr), and we have a VOIP phone so we suddenly had no phone.  The anesthesiologist normally calls you the night before surgery to talk to you about your options and since I have some weird medical conditions I really wanted to talk to her.  I was really upset because Master Pravus called Comcrap and they said they needed to send someone out to fix our Internet and cable.  >.< 

Of course it was going to be the next day, so I was terrified I wouldn’t get to talk to the anesthesiologist.  I also knew that there was nothing I could do about it, so I just tried to relax a bit and not think about it.  Master Pravus tried to call the hospital to see if they would update our phone number with the anesthesiologist but the nurse said that it was no big deal if we couldn’t talk to her and they would just talk to me in the morning.  THAT upset me more because as I said to Master “it’s never a big deal when it isn’t you getting the surgery!”  I just tried to distract myself with Mario and not think of it though. Dwelling on it wouldn’t make it better.

Luckily, the anesthesiologist had the good sense to call Master Pravus cell phone since our house phone was out.  She said she doesn’t usually call the emergency contact number but it was important to her to talk to her patients the night before.  Woot!  That put me at ease..  Until we started talking about all of the options.  I was told this would be completely different that the last anesthesia I had before, and she had all these measures set up with me specifically in mind.  It was nice that someone knew about my POTS and my Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome without me needing to explain things to them. 

They decided they were going to set me up with a ton of fluids, and they were going to give me a steroid before the surgery, and they were going to keep me awake in the operating room so I could get my own legs set up in the stirrups before they strap me in because (wait for it!) the anesthesiologist was worried about me popping out a hip!!  Having an anesthesiologist who completely understood my conditions was just such a relief, I cannot even describe!  Unfortunately, I was terribly worried because the anesthesia was going to be different, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Well, we showed up at the hospital, and Master Pravus got me a wheelchair because there was no way I could walk all around the hospital looking for the place I needed to be on the third floor.  I was already feeling lightheaded and crummy just walking in the front door.  You’re not allowed to eat or drink before surgery so that affects my POTS in a bad way.  I got upstairs and after they figured out who was supposed to be where (no one for the surgery team was around), they put me in a room.  The nurse, seeing me in the wheelchair said “Oh, look at you!  You get the full treatment today!”  I explained that, actually, I have been stuck in a wheelchair whenever we leave the house for about the past year.  She was pretty shocked, but she also hadn’t heard of POTS before either.  She did know that I faint a lot, and was on high alert for that.

So I got my rainbow of bracelets, and I got all tucked into bed and stuff.  As my nurse (E, I will call her) was taking my medical history she asked what was in the huge backpack that Master had brought.

“Oh, just a couple of stuffed animals for recovery.”  I blushed.  I was embarrassed to admit that at my age I had brought Applepig and ZeeBee with me to surgery.  ::Cough::

“Well, do you want ’em now?” She asked.

“Yes!”

“Well get ’em!”

So Master Pravus got ZeeBee out for me, and I was able to hold onto him while I waited for surgery (side note!  They even let me bring Applepig into surgery with me!!  Best ever)!  My doctor was (as usual) running pretty late, but it was not really a big deal.  The nurse tried to get my IV, but when she saw I had no good veins she gave up and just decided to call the IV team who has the special equipment to see the veins easily and they never miss.  Unfortunately, they decided to give up on that route because we got down to fifteen minutes before my surgery, and of course the IV team was going to be another hour and a half out.  Ugh.

The anesthesiologist decided to give it a shot, and she was surprised by how weird and stretchy my veins felt.  I explained that is because of the Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.  She was saying she had never felt veins that were like that before.  She said she was sure she had missed the vein, but then it started flowing!  I was just happy she got the thing started, but now she’ll understand a bit more if she gets another stretchy-veined weirdo like me in her operating room.  They took me back and got me positioned and then they took my glasses off (score! they let me have them in the operating room!) and then the next thing I knew I was in recovery.  I don’t even remember being put to sleep or anything.

Recovery was okay.  They gave me juice and applesauce and all the nurses were going on about what a lightweight I was with medicine!  Ha ha, it must have not taken too much to knock me out.  They had me rate my pain when I woke up and I told them it was a five (but still, it was nothing near as bad as most of my periods, no joke), so she gave me half a dilauded pill and let me sleep some more. 

When I woke up Master Pravus was there and he was trying to feed me more juice!  Ha ha, that is just like him.  He had snacks and stuff ready for me in the car on the way home too (just some pretzels and water).  He likes to feed me.  Lol.  But, in all fairness, I had not had anything to eat since 8PM the night before (I could eat up until 1AM, but who is going to wake up at 1AM for a snack?)

Once the nurses felt I was stable enough they got me ready to go and Master Pravus got the car to bring around.  While I was upstairs with the nurse she was asking me why I didn’t just get a hysterectomy instead of an ablation.

“Oh, you must still be on the fence about having kids.”

I told her that you can’t have kids even with an ablation, and that we did the ablation because it was the least invasive thing.  Why would I want to have major surgery that takes forever to heal from unless I had to?  I mean, burning off the inside of your uterus is pretty minor.  It may take a month or so to heal, but a hysterectomy takes 3-6 months for a normal person, and I usually take double the normal time to heal.  I mean, I know she meant well, but I was just taken aback that she’d ask me something like that.  To me and Master Pravus, doing the simplest thing first seems like a no-brainer.  I guess the nurses in the surgery department don’t always feel that way though.  ::Shrugs::

On the way home Master Pravus decided to stop off a Panera to get a baguette and a chai tea latte.  He told me that if I needed to be on light foods a fresh bread was the best way to go.  Isn’t he completely sweet?  LOL!  And I told you that he likes to feed me.  I have to say that I was much more impressed with this anesthesia I had.  I didn’t get the least bit nauseous at all, and the only really major difference with it was that when I woke up I was super sleepy.  I slept most of the day yesterday on and off, watching the Super Mario Bros Super Show in between naps.  Later in the day I woke up enough to sit up and I was even able to play a little Oblivion on and off.

At some point in the afternoon Master Pravus decided to go out and get me another latte.  I felt so spoiled.  “You had surgery so you get as many lattes as you want today!” he told me.  LOL!  I didn’t even ask for a second one.  As soon as I threw the cup in the trash he decided to go get another one.  Not that I minded, and I wasn’t complaining.

Oh, and at some point Comcrap showed up to fix the cable and Internet, but of course I slept through that.  I expected to wake up in heaps of pain this morning, but I didn’t.  It’s only day one of ablation healing, but I have a very good feeling and very high hopes for this. 

I was also thinking that this will be pretty awesome for my cam stuff because I won’t need to take seven to ten days off in a row from (xxx) cam anymore.  That’ll be pretty swanky.  I mean, not that I’d do this just to cam more, but that’ll just be an awesome side effect.  He he.  With any luck I will be back on cam in a month or so.  I obviously have to wait until I can have sex again, and the doc says to give it probably from two to four weeks.  Post op is in two weeks, so with luck that will be great too.

The entire thing went really well, but I do have to say I was really disappointed in one thing: my Mom never called to check on me.  She knew I had surgery yesterday.  She also was opposed to the surgery because she thought the anemia was my own fault for not eating meat (even though I have been eating meat for a year and it has not helped at all).  She’s stubborn and old fashioned, and I had thought that she would care enough to at least call and see that everything went okay.  She didn’t though. 

Even though the phone was out for most of the day, she could have left a message regardless, so I know she didn’t call. Friends and other family called, even people on Twitter DMed me to see how I was..  But not my Mom.  I don’t even have words for that, truly.  It just really bothered (and still does, honestly) me that she would not set aside her (wrong) opinion and just be a Mom.  Even my brother pointed out how asinine of an opinion that was.  “She does realize she became anemic even though she’s never gone a day in her life without eating meat, right?” my brother pointed out.  Yep.  Yep she does.  >.<  I don’t know what’s going on with her, but whatever it is, it’s her problem and not mine.

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