The week of the 23rd has just started when the phone rings - it's the Manhattan VA again, and I am scheduled for my pre-bed testing at 8 AM on the 21st. Uh! I think you're wrong...Dr. Zampell has me scheduled for those tests on the 22nd. "Oh, no, sir! We do this testing on Wednesdays, and you are on our schedule for that morning." Well, I can't make it, so what do we do? "You'll have to get your doctor to call us - we can't go changing these schedules." So I call Dr. Z, and am told to simply ignore the call, that everything has been set up, and to just get myself there before 7 PM on Wednesday. No problem.
But again, how am I going to get there? I will not ask my family to do this trip again. And so the old "Wilkes-Barre shuttle" plan goes into play. And again, my family trumps me - daughter Amanda says that her hubby, JT, knows NYC inside and out, and that he will be happy to drive me over this time. Oh, man! I'm feeling great that this will be, and yet I feel like I'm putting someone else out. It's a burden I don't want to impose, but Amanda simply says, "that's what family is for" and it's settled. It will be a one-way trip for me, so there will be no parking - JT will drop me off at the front door and head home. And since it's late in the day, the traffic will be light. And so, at 6:45 PM, I step out of the car and into the hospital for what will be a 2-day stay...I will spend the night, do the pre-bed on Thursday, followed by the surgery on Friday, and I will go home on Saturday morning. Sounds good to me.
And now the whole thing starts getting really serious. I'm checked in, handed some PJ's and given a room and a bed. I hate hospitals! I have a room-mate, who is very quiet but for one problem - there are little TV sets suspended above each bed, and this guy has his running when I get there. It's still running at 4 AM, when I have to ask the nurse to turn it off. And then there is the nurse's schedule, which seems to be to wait until I am sound asleep, and then walk into the room, turn on every light, and ask me if everything is okay. I swear, they do this on purpose! As I lay there, the seriousness of my situation finally starts to sink in. For a month or more now, I have blithely put off any concerns, thinking that everything will happen tomorrow. And now it's tomorrow, and in two days I will be in an operating room, being carved up like a Christmas turkey, to remove a very nasty cancer. Finally, it's showtime. And me, this 66-year-old macho dude, I'm a little scared.
Thursday morning, I'm served the usual hospital grub, which is surprisingly almost edible. I'm not too hungry, so I eat the sausage patty and a banana, and half the coffee, and soon enough, they've come to take me to X-ray. I get a mini-tour of the hospital as I'm wheeled from my 10th floor room to the 4th floor - this is a big hospital - for shots of my shoulder area. A little closer to the knife - what in Sam Hill am I doing here? We're really going to do this, aren't we? Well, I suck it up, and soon I'm back in my room, watching Pawn Stars. And then I get a visit from the oncology surgeon, and several other doctor-types. This, I find out, is a teaching hospital, and there are a lot of interns on the way to their residency. After the doctor explains to me what he will do, in very graphic terms, he turns to these 3 interns and gives them a mini-lesson in oncology, using me as his prop. Oh, wonderful! Don't mind me if I go to sleep. Dr. Z pops in a bit later to see how I'm doing, and reminds me that I will not be able to eat or drink after midnight. Well, that's okay, as I'm losing my appetite thinking about tomorrow, anyway. Back to the TV, a little bite of faux-dinner, and try to sleep. And at 3 AM I have to ask the nurse again to turn off my room-mate's TV. Good night!
Bummer! It's 6 AM, and the nurse comes in with her little torture rack to take my temperature, pulse and blood pressure. This is IT! D-day! She also brings me one of those hospital gowns that covers your front and shows the world your caboose! I hate those things! And I'm given a packet of giant wipes and told to give myself a bath. Oh, great! I sequester myself in the bathroom, strip, and wipe myself clean with these things, and put on the infamous gown. I'm slick wit this thing - before I put it on, I tie both of the cords on the back as tightly as possible, and then slip the gown on over my head. Ain't nobody gonna see my booty if I can help it! Back to bed to await my fate, and shortly, the gurney arrives to take me to the butcher shop. As absurd as that sounds, that's exactly how I'm feeling at the moment.
First stop, though, is nuclear medicine. I talk to the doctor who explains that they will make 4 injections around the melanoma. He's a matter-of-fact kinda guy, Jewish with a yarmulke, and he says, "I could numb the area, but the anesthetic needle would hurt just as much as the injections. So no anesthesia. I'll give you 4 shots, and they will hurt (thanks, doc, for your brute honesty!). And then we will take you to the machine and trace the route of the injections to see which lymph nodes may have been affected." Okay with me, doc...you've got a captive audience. Go for it. I'm rolled into a room with something that looks like an open MRI machine, where I'm told to lie down on a very cold table. The technicians running the show are very friendly and try to make me comfortable. Like I can be comfortable right now??? Then Dr. Frankenstein asks for the 1st hypodermic, and I swear, it looks like a scene from the mad doctor's lab - a heavily-gloved technician cautiously brings a stainless steel cylinder over and slowly unscrews the heavy lid, and offers it to the doctor, who gingerly withdraws the syringe, looks at it closely (you can see where my mind is at the moment), and then bends over and pushes the small needle into my shoulder. When he told me this was going to hurt, I prepared myself for some real pain, but this is a slight pinch and a short-term burning sensation. That wasn't so bad, and three more shots later, I am told that I must lay "absolutely" still while this machine does its thing. "For how long?", I ask. "Oh, about an hour or so. Might be more or less...depends on how fast the trace flows."
Now, I'm a little ADD! Okay, more than a little! I can lay still for about 3 minutes...if I'm asleep. The platform I'm lying on moves me into and under a large plate with cross-hairs, and once they have the location mapped on their computers, it's picture time. Just tell me to lay still and watch how fast I get an itchy nose. Probably about 30 minutes into this Chinese torture treatment I'm getting very twitchy. "How much longer, doc?" "We're almost done...a few more minutes!" And then I see 2-3 more doctors enter the room, and I can barely over-hear the discussion about which lymph nodes will be removed, how hard this will be, who will do which surgery... This HAS to end soon, or I'm gonna flip out. And then the machine is turned off, I'm out from under the plate, and back on the gurney.
And headed directly to the surgical ward. We round a corner, and there are two surgical nurses waiting outside the doors. Scrubs, caps, face shields and masks...I picture them rubbing their hands together with glee and chuckling. "Ah-hah, our victim has arrived!" And now, for the first time since I've been here, I am really scared. Why? I don't know, but my mind goes into hyper-speed: lying there on that table, totally unconscious, mostly naked, with a bunch of guys with sharp instruments hacking away at my shoulder. What if something goes wrong? What if I don't wake up? And I know what this is - I'm forgetting that my God is in charge here. I'm being attacked by the author of doubt. And so I close my eyes and pray that He will be there with me in that operating room, guiding the hands of the surgeons and keeping me from harm. I'm moved from the gurney to the operating table, and looking up at all of those lights and people in masks, and someone puts an oxygen mask over my face and tells me to relax and breathe deeply...
"Mr. Barth, Mr. Barth...how are you feeling?" I open my eyes and look around - the room is empty except for me and my gurney. I feel okay, a little groggy but otherwise fine. There's a clock across the room on the wall, and it says 6:30. I went into the operating room at 11 AM. Whoa! I was in surgery for 7 hours! Way back when all of this was being planned, I was told that it would take maybe 3 hours total. What happened? Well, my mind can't wrap itself around this stuff right now, and in a few minutes, an orderly rolls me back to my bed on 10 North. And amazingly, someone thought that I would be hungry after this thing, and dinner is delivered before I'm even back in bed. This was so humorous to me that I almost laughed. Almost, because every time I took a deep breath or coughed, it hurt! I'm hooked to an IV which is delivering a saline solution and an antibiotic, but when I tell the nurse I have to use the little boy's room, she disconnects me and asks if I can use the rest room by myself. Strangely enough, I am confident enough to reply "Yeah!" And I struggle out of the bed, get my feet on the floor, and waddle into the john.
Oh, sweet relief! After 7 hours! And I shuffle over to the sink to wash my right hand (the left one ain't working so well), and...SWEET MOTHER OF PEARL!!! I look in the mirror! What the heck is this monstrosity on my left shoulder? I have been mutilated, hacked to pieces, even! When I went into surgery, I had this little patch of brown stuff up there, and I thought that a small piece of skin was going to be replaced. This scar looks like the Suez Canal. It starts at my arm pit and goes up over my shoulder. No wonder I was in surgery for 7 hours!
Oh, man! And then I remember the flap thing, and if this is the skin from that flap...I turn to my right, and look at my left side. And it's WORSE!! Right now I'm not feeling much pain, but I can only imagine what's going to happen when all of the anesthesia wears off. I've also got this tube draining the side incision into a little bulb, and that bulb does its best to be in the way every time I move. I get myself back to my bed and start to rationalize how I'm going to lay down with all of this. I manage to slide into the bed and the nurse reconnects me to the IV, and all I want to do is go to sleep and wake up to the realization this was all a bad dream. But first I have to call my wonderful wife, who I know is worried crazy about me. I was going to call her after a 3-hour operation, and it's now after 8 PM. Just hearing her voice on my cell phone takes a lot of the pain away, and I miss her something awful! Right now, I would give anything to have her sitting here next to my bed and holding my hand. I attempt to prepare her for what she will see tomorrow - I tell her I look like Frankenstein's monster! But I let her know everything is alright, that I can't wait to see her. I kiss her goodnight over the phone, and Saturday can't come soon enough! I'm asleep before I know it.
I wake up a lot sooner than I wanted to, and my left armpit, or what remains of it, feels like someone has run a bayonet into it. I click on the call button, and the duty nurse comes in. Before she can ask what's wrong, I tell her my pain level is 10+! I am allergic to morphine, and so all my pain meds will be administered orally. Not good right now, because I hurt like crazy, and the Vicodin I am given will take about 25-30 minutes to take effect. I lay there trying not to moan, and finally the drugs take effect, and I go back to sleep. Last thing I remember thinking is, "And you're going home in the morning??? Are you crazy?"
I am still in a state of disbelief when Dr. Z comes in to visit on Saturday morning. She thinks everything went extremely well, and she is impressed with the results. Since my opinion is that I look like I was attacked by Genghis Khan with a dull machete, I feel a little better. She will go to the desk and arrange my release, and get me set up with antibiotics and pain meds. I thank her profusely for not killing me, she laughs and wishes me good luck and then she's gone. I'm still trying to figure out how they're letting me go home looking like this when my other doctor comes in, the surgeon who did the excision and lymph node removal. And once again, he says, "It looks great! Everything went very well, and there should be no problems." And so I am reassured twice, and my mood lightens considerably.
And my cell goes off, and it's my wonderful honey, letting me know that she and JT are on the way - it's about 12:30, so they should be here around 2:30. That does it! Since I woke up this morning, I have been laying there not wanting to move for fear of pulling stitches or making something mess up. But now I am empowered by my wife's message, and I am determined to get myself dressed and ready to go. I grab my Jockeys and my jeans and creep into the bathroom to change - I still feel like something could "come loose" if I move the wrong way. And I succeed! Just putting on my clothes feels great, and I slowly get back into bed to watch a bit of TV to wait for my ride back home. What I didn't expect comes next - Jen walks into my room, and I freeze. Oh, boy! Well, I told her what to expect, but she is so cool...I'm standing there without a shirt on, with all of these scars exposed, and she barely blinks. I love her so much right now. I expected her to really flip out, but she walks up and kisses me and asks me if I'm okay. Whatta woman! We even make jokes about it - one thing she and I have always had is a great sense of humor. So even though I'm looking like a victim of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we're laughing.
Well, all I want to do is get the blazes out of here! Quick! Help me put that shirt on. Here's my backpack, here's my shoes, here's my paper bag with my meds! Where's JT? I am surprised when I learn they're going to let me walk myself out. Jen asks if they are sending a wheelchair, and the nurse asks her if I can walk okay. Well, that settles that. Grab the stuff and let's scram! Only "scramming" in my case is a slow shuffle - I can't walk as easily as I thought I could. Every step hurts, but I ignore the pain - I'm going HOME! From the 10th floor to the lobby, it's not pretty, but we get there, and JT is waiting with the SUV. Oops! How on God's green earth am I going to get into this thing? And then Jen says that I'm bleeding "back there." Oh, great! I don't need that, too, but I want to get out on the road and away from the VA hospital. I get in the back seat, Jen climbs in beside me, and we start the long journey home.
(to be continued...)
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