Funny story...
I couldn’t have anything to eat or drink after midnight before my surgery. The last think I had was a glass of water around 9:30pm. Woke up the next morning super early, peed, showered, got ready, and showed up at the hospital. When they take me back to prep me, they draw blood, hook me up to an EKG, take a chest x-ray, and then tell me that they’ll need a urine sample. I’m like… not sure I’m going to be able to oblige you there. They laughed and said, “Oh, you’ll be fine, just keep trying.”
An hour later... no dice. I’m thinking to myself, I really wish someone had TOLD me they were gonna need a sample, otherwise I would have saved it up that morning!
(How do you forbid a person to drink anything for eight hours and then demand urine on the spot!??)
So I ask the nurse, what happens if I can’t give a sample?
She tells me they’ll just have to put a catheter in.
OH.
MY.
GOD.
PLEASE... NO.
So they start wheeling me up to the surgical waiting area and tell me I can try again before they put my IV in.
I’m about to have fairly serious back surgery, and 98% of the anxiety I’m experiencing is about the potential of having to be catheterized.
As people are buzzing around and I’m just laying there stressing, the anesthesia doctor comes over and is asking a bunch of questions, and the nurse tells him, “We still don’t have a urine sample.”
And to my ever-grateful delight, he replies, “Why did they order that?”
She shrugs, and says, “I guess to check for a UTI?”
He responds, “That’s a bit of overkill, don’t you think?”
She shrugs.
He turns to me and asks, “Do you have any trouble peeing?”
I reply, “Not usually.”
He laughs.
She laughs.
I laugh.
We all laugh.
Then they put me to sleep and cut me open, remove the giant disc fragments that had been crushing my nerve, and glue me back together.
So, by way of update…
Thanks to everyone for all of the well-wishes, prayers, and happy thoughts.
I’m incredibly thankful, once more for the care, expertise, and kindness of all of the medical professionals who handled me. From the x-ray technicians to the nurse who hooked up my IV to the anesthesiologist to, of course, my surgeon and his team, everyone was amazing and helped put me at ease and fix my back.
In addition, my wife Jami was super amazing. This is the first time during our 12+ years of marriage that I’ve been truly “down and out” with something physically, and she took such good care of me and the girls. I truly felt loved and at ease and able to recuperate.
I’m about a week post-op right now and seem to be healing up nicely from what I can tell. My incision is still a bit tender, and I’ve had flashes of my “pre-op” pain, which is apparently normal, albeit still a bit disconcerting, but nothing remotely close to the constant, debilitating pain I was in before. In fact, I’ve been on my feet at times for stretches of ten minutes or more and have been in no pain whatsoever.
So, yet again, I’m thankful.
P.S. Thanks to my parents, as well, who took care of my kids a few nights and were there for me (and more importantly) my wife at the hospital.