Patients & Patience

Yesterday, I had an unusual experience with a hospital, this time from the outside looking in instead of from the inside looking out. I know that being in a hospital can be dreadful, both because of the illness or injury as well as the feeling of being held captive, of feeling powerless. But the experience for visitors waiting for hospital procedures can be equally dreadful.

          My wife Rosalie had surgery yesterday at the Banner Boswell Medical Center in Sun City. She was there for the removal of cancer from her right lung and her anxiety kept growing from when she first learned of the cancer to the day when she was finally scheduled for the surgery. So she had well over a month for her anxiety to grow like a malignancy.

          Finally, yesterday came and we were anxious to get it over with so that life could resume. We both thought it would be a fairly simple, routine procedure, tiny incision, tiny camera and cutting tool, removal of the cancerous spot, about the size of a fifty-cent piece. Simple, right? Stitch it up and that would be it, maybe a two-day hospital stay, maybe less. Wrong.

          I and daughter Jeri drove her to the hospital at 9:30 for her 10:00 surgery. She was taken in for pre-op right at 10:00. Jeri and I waited in the lounge near the registration desk for them to call us in to see her before the operation. They called us in at noon. Two hours to get her ready for surgery? That seemed to be unnecessarily long. We sat with her there for another two hours, wondering why it was taking so long. During the two hours, we chatted with Norma, her pre-op nurse, Taylor, Dr. Kuo’s surgical assistant, who explained to Rosalie and us what the surgery would involve, an assistant anesthetist whose name I never heard who in whispers (in very heavy dialect from somewhere in Africa) asked her questions about her medications, allergies, past smoking history, what and when she had last eaten or drunk. About the only thing he didn’t ask was when she’d last had a bowel movement. All this information would be in her computer files, questions having been answered two or three times before we’d arrived at the hospital. Then we had a visit from the surgical anesthesiologist who asked her the same set of questions and told her what kind of anesthetic they would be using. And finally Dr. Kuo, the surgeon, arrived to tell us again what the procedure would involve. His final comment was that she would be in surgery for about four hours. Four hours?! Whoa! This would not be what we thought was a simple surgery.

          They took her away at 2:00 and Jeri and I went back to waiting in the outer lounge. Three and a half hours later, we were informed that she was out of surgery, were told it would be about another fifteen minutes before Dr. Kuo could see us to tell us how it went. Thirty minutes later, Dr. Kuo told us it had gone very well, showed us some ghastly photos of what they had removed, and said we could see her in about thirty minutes when they had her back in the post-op section. He had removed not just a little fifty-cent piece of her lung but the entire upper right lobe, which measured in the photos about 13” x 5”. This obviously had been much more than a simple surgery.

          We saw her at 6:30 but she was still so out of it from pain meds and anesthesia she didn’t really know who we were. So we left her there, to be transferred to the ICU unit sometime that evening. And then to a regular room for another two to four days. She and I had both thought she might be able to come home no later than Wednesday, but Friday or Saturday now seems more likely.

          As with all surgeries, big and little, the stress on the patient is great, but I now know, after nine hours of waiting, waiting, that the stress on those who wait is also great.