Even though I kind of already wrote about this two days ago, here is a diarist account that I actually wrote in the hospital. Nothing new really, except how I got lost in the morgue.

Perhaps we join the drama with the opening act: pre-op. Pre-op means different things to different surgical procedures, but in this case, it meant some blood tests, some signing of a living will that gave me permission to pull the plug is I felt the time had come--that kind of thing. There was a little drama with the doctors, because she had made the unusual request that she wanted her rib. Meaning she wanted it back, after they cut it out. That was the surgery, the rib removal. The reason, to pre-empt the inevitable Cher question, had nothing to do with her vanity. The rib being cut out was, first of all, the first rib, the one up by her neck, and it was so blood would flow better through the Axillary vein, which was being crushed between the rib and the clavicle. This was the cause of blood clots, aka DVT.

My poor broken hoinus was scared to go through Pre op by herself, so naturally I took off from work to console her. I even took a cab, on account of a colleague/bozo at work was not accommodating enough about time in a meeting to allow me to get there by mass transit.

So after a bunch of talk about getting back the rib post surgery, and blood work, enough time passed that it was finally show time. At about 5 am on the actual day, we came in and got all prepped and scrubbed and IV lines in. A cologne stinking anesthesia doctor with a Gucci watch made bad jokes, and a nice, soft spoken doctor hung around and kind of smiled. There was a lot of commotion generally, even though very little was actually happening.

Then I had to go down to a waiting area, after they wheeled her away on the gurney. I was sent to sit in a room full of other people all waiting for their family, friends and loved ones to come out of surgery. It was a pretty tense room. Finally, after about six hours, a doctor came down, to say things had worked out. He was still sweaty and had some flecks of blood on his cheek, which I presume came out of my wife.

I went up to see my hoiny, who was in PACU, which was pretty gruesome, and full of beeping equiptment. A fat Mexican in a gurney seemed to be suffocating on his mucus and a small team of doctors were suction out gunk from a tube in a his mouth, plus calling out his name really loud, telling him to breathe.

Then, after a few hours, they released her from PACU to go to her room. From that point on, for the next five days or so, there was mostly laying around. Or she was, I was sitting around. Progress was measured by how many lines were removed, because each time a catheter or IV came out, it was a measure of progress.

My hoiny had a few tubes going too. Like one up her nose, a few in her arms, a big bloody  drain in her chest, and one in her cooter, for pee to come out of.

One night, after being at her bedside for a long stretch, I was leaving, and I got off at the wrong floor by accident, and I got lost in the morgue. This was upsetting, both because I was lost and wandering down hallways searching for a way out of the hospital, and because there were dead bodies all around, with signs on doors like "Identification Room" and biohazard bags in the hall with buckets that said "Specimens Only" with the word only underlined three times, to indicate some people weren't listening.

Anyhow, she slowly but surely recovered, though there was one sort of awful night when she started to bleed out of the wound. Which wasn’t really medically serious, but there is something to the nightmare of waking up in a puddle of your own blood.