Times Like These
Title courtesy of The Foo Fighters.
The meaning, its times like these that make you realize just how much someone or something is important to you. Let me elaborate.
I had the joy of spending the day at the hospital yesterday. Thankfully, this time, it wasn't anything I did to myself. One trip for personal reasons is enough per year. Mine was last June. I went with Missy and her mom yesterday while Missy had an outpatient operation on her sinuses. She's been suffering for awhile from chronic sinus infections. Almost one a month for the past few months. I'm not sure how bad it was before she met me. The problem was that her sinuses didn't drain correctly, so the stuff was just sitting in there, which led to infections. So, her doctor operated to widen her sinuses so they would drain correctly, fixed a deviated septum and also removed two small bones that were causing issues as well.
So I called in sick to work and went with her to her parents house at like 10:15. Missy, her mom and I left for the hospital at about 10:30 and checked her into the ambulatory surgery unit at about 11:00. She changed into a lovely hospital gown and we sat with her and waited while they went through the final pre-op stuff, like signing consent forms and all that fun stuff. Her doctor came over and spoke with us and at about 12:30-12:45 they wheeled her to OR and her mom and I went to the surgical waiting room at about 1:00.
Missy's brother works in the area so he came by on his lunch hour to sit and wait with us for awhile, but he left by about 2:00. At 2:30 the doctor called and said that the surgery was over and everything went fine and she was in recovery. They didn't have to pack the inside of her nose, which meant that she'd be a lot more comfortable post-op and in the next few days as well. The doctor said we could probably go in and see her in once they moved her from recovery to post-op in about 45 minutes. Well, 3:15 rolled around and nothing. At some point they paged her doctor over the intercom. For what, who knows, but that didn't stop us from worrying.
Up until about the second hour of her being in recovery I was fine. I knew she'd be OK and that it wasn't anything serious to be worried about. But by that second hour, at about 3:30, I really started to feel weird. Its hard to describe, but part of me wished that I had been going through the same thing, just so I would know how she was feeling. I had no idea how she was doing, if she was OK, or out of it, having a bad reaction to the anesthesia, or any other combination of things. And that just left me feeling really weird in a very unexplainable way. By 4:30 we were told that we could go into post-op and sit with her.
I was really expecting the worst, because beforehand Missy kept trying to tell me how bad it was going to be, but she didn't look to bad. Her face around her eyes and nose were obviously swollen, and she had a nose splint on and a lot of gauze covering her nostrils that was slowly getting bloodier and bloodier. But I thought it was going to be a lot worse, and she thought the experience was going to be bad as well, and it wasn't. So by that point I was relieved that all had gone well and that she was OK and just needed time to heal.
We were able to leave the hospital by about 5:30 and got back to her house by 6:00. She changed her gauze and took the first of what I'm sure will be a few Vicodins. She relaxed for most of the rest of the evening and I left at about 11:00, after we watched Lost. She's got the rest of the week off and most of next week off. She'll be going back to work on Thursday, by which time most of the swelling and the developing black eyes will go away.
I'm just glad she's OK. I think times like these, experiencing something like this just makes you realize how much you truly care for and love someone.
End of story, and back to work!