Home from the Hospital

Our experience of John's surgery was much different than we expected. We arrived at the hospital at 1 pm Friday for 3 pm surgery. As we waited in pre-surgery, our daughter Kara taught us how to make a friendship bracelet out of the lining of a Coke bottlecap. She had packed a bag full of distractions for the waiting room. John was visited by the head nurse, the anesthesiologist and the surgeon before surgery. The nurse asked if he had any body piercings and he said, "Not yet." His anesthesiologist looked at his chart twice and had trouble believing he is 70.

After he walked off with the anesthesiologist to the surgery room, my son, Daniel, Kara and I went to the waiting area in the lobby of the hospital. Less than an hour later, a physician's assistant we had gotten to know during his earlier hospital stay, came out with a smile on her face and said it was all finished and he had done great. It was 4 pm. They wouldn't let me into the recovery room until 7 to have a quick visit. He was more alert than I expected but still a little groggy. He gave me a big John smile and told me he felt like Tom Terrific. Sometime during our wait, a patient in a wheelchair started playing the piano in the lobby. Her blues style was professional sounding and we felt as if we were at a concert or a nightclub. By 9, he had a room on the seventh floor and an 80-year-old roommate who looked much younger.

By the next morning, he was sitting up and eating a clear liquid diet and had gotten up with help from his Nigerian nurse, Owen, at 3 in the morning. That day we walked four or five times up and down the hall. Two days after his surgery, he was on his way home. If the original surgery hadn't been cancelled, he would have had traditional surgery instead of laproscopic and his recovery time would have doubled. Now it's his first full day home and he's happily doing the crossword puzzle and the parakeets are clucking and chortling now that their flock is back.

After canceling all my organizing clients for the past two weeks, I'm looking forward to getting back to two of my favorites the end of the week. I had to also cancel going to the NAPO conference in Reno but I'll get the tape of the keynote speaker, Peter Walsh, author of It's All Too Much. I learned a lot more by staying home and taking care of my partner. And the biggest lessons were about gratitude and compassion.