Last blog post was about what a Trachelectomy is. This blog post is about my own Trachelectomy or at least the surgical part of it and the hijinks that ensued. Ooh, you are lucky things! To be fair, as I was unconscious for most of it I don’t know how long this post will be. I am planning on doing a post-Trach post (that’s a lot of posts) separately.
Here is the Jolly Christmas Postman.
Why? Why not? (Because there were lots of posts… get it? Get it?! What do you mean it is neither hilarious nor witty??!
About two days before I was due to have The Big Op I was called by the hospital to inform me that my lymph nodes had come back clear. “Whew,” I said and wiped the sweat from my brow. Or I’m assuming that’s what I would have done had I been a lady in a classic novel. Sure, people have written about our Regency heroines battling zombies (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies anyone?) but have you read about Elizabeth Bennet popping those heels together and getting those knees apart? No. No you haven’t.
Brain Dump of Amazingness: Write a compilation of how literary, tv and movie female characters would handle their smears… if it works for Literary Starbucks it can work for gynae tests…
I also received a call from the hospital the day before my Trach. In what was the start of a regular occurrence (though I wouldn’t know this at the time) they were calling to postpone the operation – luckily only by three days.
Relief and disappointment hit me in waves. Relief, because my body was still aching from the surgery I’d had a week before and disappointed because it felt like someone had just cancelled Christmas on Christmas Eve. I imagine the person making the call looked like this…
At something like two in the afternoon I proceeded to do what any self-respecting woman in her early thirties would do…
The pool of maturity in which I swim is deep.
However, the silver lining (I’m all about the silvery, shimmering lining) is that during those three days we went to see a potential wedding venue which we ended up going with. Sure, I hobbled around like an injured rabbit but I don’t think they noticed. They probably noticed.
I learnt my lesson from the last procedure and did not eat out of date ham the night before this operation. Instead I had to drink a carbohydrate pre-load and a good couple of pints of it. I was supposed to drink some the night before and some in the morning which I had to get up at stupid o’clock to do.
My advice is this… drink the pre-load. It’s supposed to keep your energy up or something and help you recover quicker. It has the distinct look of really bad, cloudy tap water and tastes like someone crumbled up old chalk into your glass so I recommend adding some squash to it just to take the taste away.
Then it was rinse and repeat all over again. So far, I have managed to spend my life in good health and so having two operations in two weeks and both for cancer was…. surreal. For me this seems to be the word that sums up the whole experience. There is a fair element of dissociation that seems to occur and I think this might be the brains way of getting you through intact.
Second time around I knew what to expect.
They take more blood and urine. You get into the hospital gown. You put on the surgical stockings. They come around and do the checks. You get in the bed. You kiss your partner goodbye. You get wheeled off. You get left alone, again, in an area where you just wait. Rinse and repeat.
This time I put in a request for additional anti-nausea medicine for afters (you know, because hospitals take requests and can offer additional services) because I didn’t want a repeat of last time where I was not so gleefully vomiting up my solo cup of tea. To be fair to them, they actually did give me the extra medicine and you’ll be pleased to hear there was no puking this time.
Bless you, anti-nausea medicine.
Much like last time I went under, they did what they needed to do, and then I came to in post-op recovery. Did I mention that it takes days to get surgical adhesive of the underside of your boobs? Days! (In a modesty saving move when they peel back the hospital gown they stick it to your boobs so you don’t have ‘the ladies’ unnecessarily on display and wobbling about).
Whilst we are on the subject of modesty whilst I remind you this is the position they put you in:-
My amazing boobs were the very least of my worries.
Without wanting to sound like a complete and utter drug riddled individual, waking up wasn’t so bad because you are on morphine. Wonderful, wonderful morphine.
This bit is all fine as you’re far too doped up to care what is happening and you don’t feel any pain yet – just discomfort. In fact, I’m glad I was too doped up to care because a male nurse checked my Uber Sanitary Towel of Doom. It reaches your navel and stretches riiiiight the way to your back. I know he was a medical professional but when some dude is like ‘let me check out your disgusting mess of a medical sanitary towel from the gynaecological surgery you had an hour ago’ part of you withers up and dies inside and you ain’t ever getting that part back.
They wheeled me up to the ward where I was to spend the night. Can you TripAdvisor a hospital? Hold on…
No. No you cannot.
Gerry’s Tips: –
Prepare yourself though. Despite all the above you won’t get any sleep because the nurses need to check on your regularly throughout the night. I enjoyed getting my arm squeezed into a blood pressure cuff every two hours and loved having a thermometer shoved under my tongue at five am. I love it even more when they ignore someone’s alarm for forty minutes. If you can’t detect tone in the last sentences than let me make it clear what I was aiming for.
But they are, after all, doing their jobs. Apart from those nurses that ignored the old woman on the ward’s alarm for forty minutes. Seriously? Where the fuck were you?!! Ahem. Moving on.
Another tip for you: –
If you have a catheter try not to accidentally tug on it. Nothing makes your eyes water quicker than a good, sharp tug to the urethra. The next morning when the nurse came to take it out I tried some negotiating to get her to leave it in forever.
“It won’t hurt,” she told me. “You’ll feel a little pinch but it will be more uncomfortable than painful.” She was right. It didn’t hurt but on the scale of fun things that I’ve enjoyed in my life, having a rubber tube pulled from my pee hole is not on the list. Actually, let me check that…
No. No it is not.
What happens next is this…
I managed to win my challenge due to the copious amounts of water I was chugging and called my partner essentially begging for him to drive like a speed demon and pick me up.
I do wish I had taken the contact details of my Weeing Challenge pal opposite me as she was actually in hospital for the exact same thing as me and so it was nice to have someone to talk to about the experience. I made so many jokes about grabbing my own fanny just to reassure myself it was still there that she started laughing too hard and had to keep grabbing at her own fanny. Well, she couldn’t grab at mine.
Laughter won’t cure all your ills but it does help sweeten them. Or so someone wise (me) has said.
I walked out of the hospital that day with my head held high.
Biggest. Mistake. Ever.
Not everything is a life challenge. If you’ve just had a big gynaecological surgery and you insist on walking to the car despite the protests of your partner than maybe you need to stop and think about some things. You don’t have to be hard assed when no one is watching. You don’t have to be hard assed at all.
Sometimes it’s just easier to sit in the damned wheelchair.
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