In my time, I’ve watched quite some TV sitcoms about hospitals and doctors. So far in my life I was lucky enough not to spend much time in hospitals, and never to enter a surgical block before, so most of my knowledge on the matter was drawn from House M.D., Grey’s Anatomy, and E.R. And I must admit I was quite surprised to find out that in real life things look a bit different than in a TV series, shocker, right ?!
But let’s start from the beginning. My ACL reconstruction was scheduled for Tuesday at 12pm, so I was requested to check in at the front desk of the clinic one hour in advance, which was the perfect opportunity to realise that I’ve forgotten all of my blood test results and still have some time to send your boyfriend and sister back to Warsaw to get them. (Classic).
In the meantime an anaesthesiologist came and handed me a little brochure about my options, procedures, and possible side effects. If I wasn’t stressed about the surgery and missing papers enough, now I could stress about the needle in my spine, possibility of waking up mid surgery, and a chance of a heart attack, YAY. Great start. At this point sleeping through the whole thing sounded like a perfect idea.
“So if I choose full anaesthesia, how will it work ? You give me the drugs, and when I wake up everything will be over ?” I asked. – “Of course not ! Nothing will be over…” the guy said. “there will be whole life after that..”. Bazingaaa.
In the meanwhile I received a text message from my doctor “don’t worry about the tests, we will wait until they arrive. And don’t stress that much.” “Thank you, Please fix me !” – I replied. The message I got back, was simple, yet reassuring.
So the paper retrieval mission has been accomplished and everything was ready for my procedure. Now it was time to ruin all of my expectations so profoundly built up through the years of watching doctors sitcoms.
Based on those series, I believed that they put you to sleep, and then, when you’re sound asleep, they use one of these wheely beds to dramatically race you to the operating room, and after they are done, you wake up in your room surrounded by your loved ones. WRONG.
How it really went was a nurse told me to change, and no, they didn’t give me one these fancy hospital outfits. I was wearing my vans shirt, rip curl shorts, and sockies, as I followed her onto the operating block, into an operating room, and got to take a look at all those surgical devices, before I was told to lie down on the bed.
Yep. I walked in there all by myself, and saw all the torture tools. True story.
They then covered me with one of those viscose blankets, and told me to take off my sockies. Then the nurse told me that what she is about to do will hurt, as she proceeded to inject something into my arm. “Seriously !?” I asked – “yes. actually it will hurt quite a lot” – the nurse said. Spoiler – it didn’t.
I’m not sure if she was joking or if she was just pure evil. One of the doctors placed a mask over my mouth and told me to breath deeply. That’s the last thing I remember.
Now the part about peacefully waking up surrounded by your loved ones. I did wake up in my room, with my mom, sister and boyfriend around. “Did I just wake up ?” – I asked- “nope, you’re awake for about half an hour” my mom replied.
First thing I thought of doing was to take a look at my leg. It was already packed into a brace, it was all orange, and there were plastic pipes sticking out of it, leading into the little plastic packets of blood. There was an ice pack on top and everything looked kind of gross.
Then I started asking questions. Turns out I woke up at the operating block, and i was then transported to my room, where I spent 30 minutes screaming, crying and talking in all different languages, what my mom compared to one of the scenes in “The Exorcist”.
I’m REALLY glad that I can’t remember a thing of that.
The next 24 hours were not the best of my life, but at least the scariest part was behind me, plus I had an excellent WiFi connection in my room and popcorn Time installed and updated. Oh, and I never saw my sockies again.
