This may a brief update, but I will try to make up for it in comprehensiveness, snarkiness, and overall glory. It's late for me (7:39 pm) and I've not yet had the proper combination of coffee and champagne and sleep to really put me in the mood to spin tales, and it's been rather a long day, but I am your humble servant and will certainly give it the old Girl Scout try, even if I'm a few Thin Mints short of a full cookie drive.
Today, Scott had a biopsy at Kaiser. He's left not one, not two, not three, but evidently about six little pieces of him behind. And I, for one, am NOT going back to get them.
This whole business started a few weeks ago, when he was reviewing his chest scans with his oncologist. I wasn't at this meeting, and my understand is semi-fuzzy at best, but apparently there was some speculation about what exactly the bright "hot spots" in his chest could be. (I don't think the oncologist was really gearing up for a game of Twenty Questions, complete with the "Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?" starter question, but nevertheless she wanted a biopsy of the hot spots in the chest.)
Ever heard of a colonoscopy, in which they run a camera up your rear end and take little snippets of interesting tissue if you have any?
*****
Well, it turns out they can do it from the other end as well. It's called a "bronchoscopy" when they go through your nose or your mouth. (We learned it's pronounced "bron-COS-cop-ee," not "BRONC-oh-scopy," when the admitting nurse gave us that Go-Directly-To-Jail Look-o-Death when we were registering at admitting and Scott got the accent on the wrong syllable. Medical elitist linguistic pig-f**ker of a lady, no wonder they don't let her near a scalpel. She'd remove your crown jewels if you so much as *thought * of San Francisco as 'Frisco. But I digress. Back to bron-COS-cop-ee, pronounced correctly from here and ever after.)
To do the Big B, they sedate the patient, snake in the camera, follow with the biopsy tools (and for all I know, then they admit the entire Roman army to the chest), and take little bits of interesting prize tissue (so actually, make that the invading Viking army, because they were slightly more famous for going in somewhere, stealing something of interest, and then snaking it back home again.)
So he had the sedation. He had the biopsy. He came out of sedation and asked me if it was really 3:30 pm. And then by six we were home to see the kids and our wonderful sitter.
*****
We've been through this drill so many times by now that we are becoming frequent flyers, complete with nostalgic remembrances. Last time for the ostomy reversal preop, he was in that other bed over there and I only had M&Ms to eat, so I ate those till I was sick. The very first time he had surgery, we were in that other corner, where the guy with the funny feet is lying now. Today I'm smarter - I've brought a sweater and a bottle of water, and even a PowerBar. Out the window is the parking spot we used when he had his septic shock, right in front of the ER. That wheelchair looks like the one he rode out of the hospital last time in. And this preop nurse is the same one who worked on him last time. She doesn't remember us, but we remember her. She still has cold hands but is a firm believer in pain medication, and with enough pain medication, they can massage you with ice cubes and it's generally all right.
When it's time to go into surgery, I walk behind the bed as they wheel him all the way in. It's a left here, a right there, all around past the loopy volunteer station, past Labor and Delivery and all their Nervous Family Members, down the hall and through the Big Doors marked ICU. Even this evokes some sense of historical familiarity - that is the bathroom where I fielded calls from a client the first time he was in the ICU. That is the room he was in the second time he was here, when he had that super nice Indian nurse named Taj, like Taj Mahal.
It's a bit interesting to note that his biopsy is being done in a procedure room that is, ahem, in the friggin' ICU. You are only ever allowed into here when you've got Something Major Happening. Why can't my husband be one of those wayward fellows getting a fishhook pulled out of his finger in Minor Injury? But then again, he's got some health issues here and there, and they *are* putting a lot of things in his throat and trying to sneak past his heart and punch a little hole in his lungs to snag a piece of chunk in the chest. One good sneeze from the good doctor during something like this and I can see why they're wanting the ICU really close by.
*****
And here is where my experience really comes in handy. The doctor tells me the procedure will take an hour. I say goodbye to my husband. The nurse shows me to the ICU waiting room. I smile at her and wave goodbye, and the security doors of the ICU slam shut behind her. I see the "NO CELL PHONES" sign in its angry red letters. I take a quick peek into the ICU waiting room. There's an equally unfriendly sign saying that "Family members will be allowed to visit ICU patients for five minutes out of every hour. Two family members will be allowed, one at a time." From what I can piece together from the seven similar-looking multi-aged equally-wretched folks sitting there,
1) it's their Grandma in the ICU
2) they have vastly differing opinions about what's wrong with her, what treatment she should have, and whose fault it is, and
3) they all need a good stiff drink, a cigarette, or a sedative and
4) they are all ICU newbies. They are burning their candles at both ends and in the middle. They don't realize ICU stuff happens on glacial time, and that Grandma's probably so out of it that she doesn't even know how many of them are there. Somebody could surely go home and walk the dog.
It's toxic, purely toxic, awash with panic, blame, desperation, and noise.
I am NOT sitting here for an hour. I don't even go in. I wait until the nurse is safely behind the ICU security door, and then I turn my cellphone to ON, note the time, whirl on my heel, and walk out - down the corridor, past the Big Doors (I don't buzz them, I just wait and sneak out in the wake of the big whooshy laundry thingy), past Labor and Delivery (it's a boy!), past the loopy volunteer (seriously, I don't know where they find these lovely old ladies, but they all must have to pass a hairdo uniformity test in order to sit at the volunteer desk), a left there, a right here, and down the elevators into the parking lot. Around an ambulance (another Grandma with Entourage! OMG - if she goes to the ICU, the ICU waiting room could erupt in a Hatfields vs McCoys sort of situation). And I'm out, into Downtown Walnut Creek.
*****
Downtown Walnut Creek.
Where there's Free Parking. Nordstrom's. Security guards on Segways. Little girls in ballet clothes and Crocs, with their hair in buns. I think it would be responsible for me to eat something.
Instead, I duck into the Creekside Spa and get a wonderful $15 foot massage from a mahogany-colored Chinese man of indeterminate age but of certain inability to speak English.
Then, I go to Yogurt Park and have my "lunch" - vanilla and Bavarian mint, swirled, with M&Ms in them. My feet squeak in my flip-flops.
Then, I go back to Kaiser. Up, around, past, through Labor and Delivery (it's a girl and her name is Javani!), and -- wait for it -- on the heels of two doctors running to answer a page to the ICU I get in past the security doors and sit myself back in the waiting room.
The McCoys are still there. Hatfields didn't show up - perhaps their Grandma just got stuck in the ER? Maybe she was fishing and just needed a fishhook taken out of her thumb. (That is most certainly the most likely cause if my mother ever gets taken to the ER.)
But the McCoys have been going at it full scale for the past hour. Their neo-matriarch, Grandma's fifty-something daughter, comes clicking into the room in her business suit and high heels. She has evidently Won the Who Sees Grandma for These Five Minutes This Hour battle, and she didn't share her five minutes with anybody. New fuss-fuss with the rest of 'em, new blaming, new discourse on the use of mushrooms, cigarettes, and Mexican Leeches to cure [insert your version of Grandma' s condition here] that [insert your nemesis' name here] gave to her because of [insert irresponsible action here.]"
Three minutes later, the doctor comes into the waiting room to get me.
"We are finished with your husband's procedure. I'm so sorry it ran a bit over. Were you waiting long?"
I smile, all fresh as a daisy. "No, doctor, not long at all."
***
We'll find out the results next week sometime. I'm curious to see - did they find anything? Was it animal, vegetable, or mineral? Perhaps a wayward Viking pickaxe?
I have yogurt drips down the front of my shirt.
Wonderful day, all told.
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