Ok, by Beth's request, my sort-of-funny surgery story.

I had to have a device placed before my surgery that marked the area that needed to come out; they remove it and it makes a noise when a machine touches it so they know it's gone. I'd had one done before and it was not much; just a shot of novicaine, a little tiny incision, a few minutes of pulling and no pain and that was it. Just a bandaid to go.

Well, this was already going to be worse in my head because I knew I'd be doing it on the medieval torture device (my pdoc called it that and it's accurate) which you like face down with your breast through a hole while they work from underneath you. So I'd had a biopsy with that machine and knew what to expect except that I knew climbing around on the table to get into place would be extra-fun with an IV bag. But I wasn't really worried.

Well, she poked and poked and just couldn't get it right. I was numb so I don't know how many times she tried but I have a lot of bumps and sore areas that I think are from multiple trials. Finally they took me into another room for another mammogram to be sure it was placed right. It wasn't. I have another benign tumor we weren't removing and she had repeatedly gotten that mass instead of what we were removing.


So they decided to use another machine and put in guide wires instead of the reflector. "The old fashioned way". So we went to yet another room (with my needing bathroom breaks whenever I was allowed because of the IV fluidis). This time the set-up was like my first hospital, where you sit in a chair for the procedure while it is still guided by mammogram. So they got me in the chair and positioned with my breast clamped down and started an inital scan and the thing that moves on the mammogram machine came down on my IV pole, knocking that over and doing something to the mammogram machine. They reset it but eventually decided it was faster to move yet again. So we moved to a 4th room where they finally got the wires in place, I think without too much prodding and poking.


Then I went to room 5 for a quick mammogram to be sure the wires were right. They were and I was taken to surgery 2 hours late.


So that is my longest surgery prep ever story. It was a day you had to laugh as everything went wrong, one after the other. I thought the tech might cry when the IV pole went over.


Crazy huh?