Off to my Brave New World

This is me on the morning of my surgery. I am about to go for a major operation to remove a malignant tumour from low down in my bowel, which the surgeon describes as more complex than open heart surgery or even brain surgery. There are many things that can go wrong, not all of which would be fatal but would at least be life changing.

Apart from being tired, I was not really that nervous about going into the surgery as I knew that this is the thing that is going to save my life. I already had cancer and in the words of the surgeon, left untreated, there is no evidence that this is survivable. So, even when the senior registrar listed all the scary statistics about the things that can go wrong, I wasn’t bothered because it is already about as wrong as it can get.

Despite being very brave about it, one of my last thoughts before going under was a sense of sadness that there is a potential that the last thing I might ever see is the small and rather dull anaesthetists room (the room was small and dull and not the anaesthetist, who was unnervingly jolly).

I remember the time on the clock showing 3:15pm when they sent me off to sleep and when I woke up from the anaesthetic it was 9:05pm. My first thought was to make sure someone would call Mrs W, who I knew would be frantic as I had had to persuade her not to remain at the hospital pacing the corridors as we knew it was going to be lengthy surgery as they were doing it laparoscopically (keyhole).

Having been assured that the registrar was phoning her at that time, my brain then registered the agony that I felt in my abdomen: it transpired that they needed to pump up my epidural as even the morphine wasn’t making a lot of difference. I am told that I arrived on the ward just after midnight. I wasn’t feeling quite so positive about life at that stage and have voted that day as one of my least favourites.

Back-blipped on 4th September 2014