Love from the Waiting Room

It's 8 am here, and Bill's surgery has theoretically begun. Sarah and I got to the hospital at 6:45 and got to go right in and see him in the big area where the patients wait to be rolled to anesthesia.

He was lying there on his bed, with his head on two rubber pillows, and he was smiling and covered with electrodes. Most importantly, he was proud of his little red hat. He had on this beautiful see-through shower cap, and it was tilted to one side, pushed over by the rubber pillows, and he looked mah-velous!

He said he had only one hour of sleep last night and looks forward to being mostly asleep for three whole days. He said the entirety of last night was spent prepping him, and even though they never let him eat, he wasn't hungry because the taste of the stuff he had to drink was so disgusting and salty that he never wanted to eat again. He is--ahem--very cleaned out right now.

His blood pressure was way too high, so they gave him some medicine, and it came down a little. I'm sure he's nervous! And the salt in that colon-clusterbomb drink from last night probably wasn't helping either!

Okay, I wasn't going to tell this funny story, but Sarah said I should.

Well, as you know, Bill's doctor is the Universal King of All Bladder Oncology Surgeons. AND HE KNOWS IT. He has a very....how shall I say.... DOMINANT attitude toward things, and can be, um, clipped in his attitude. All of this accrues to the extreme benefit of the patient, however, because this truly brilliant doctor is FIERCELY DETERMINED that everything should be PERFECT for his patient, or a nurse will hear about it.

I mean, you WANT this doctor on your side.

But you might not want to be a nurse who has done something that displeases this doctor.

As happened this morning.

We had just gotten in to the surgery waiting area to see Bill, and this Great High Doctor was at the foot of Bill's bed, looking at his charts. After looking at the charts, he turned to his left and put his hands up on a table that held a keyboard with which he wanted to access a computer and read about Bill.

Well.

Someone ( a certain nurse) had put two new boxes of rubber gloves ON TOP OF THE KEYBOARD instead of in the holding bin on the wall where boxes of rubber gloves are supposed to go.

While I surreptitiously watched His Doctorness, he was irked that these gloves were on top of the keyboard. At first he was patient, and picked up one box and put it behind him on a table, but when it came to the second box, he had had enough.

HE THREW THE WHOLE BOX OF GLOVES ONTO THE FLOOR. On purpose. Well, didn't THROW it, but banged it with the back of his hand so it would fall onto the floor. And then proceeded to use the keyboard.

Well, I thought that was absolutely hilarious. Of course, I didn't make a sound, but I noted that both Bill and Sarah had seen this and also thought it was funny.

So then His Doctorness left, and soon thereafter, in came the nurse who had put the gloves on the keyboard.

She looked down on the floor at the gloves, and I explained to her what had happened.

She raised her eyebrows and looked at me like she was thinking, "He did WHAT???"

Well, then Sarah said to me, "Way to go, Mom. You narked on the doctor! Now that nurse will tell the other nurses and it could turn into a whole drama. A Scrubs episode!"

"But didn't you think it was funny?"

"I did," Sarah said, "but telling a nurse who works with the doctor wasn't the best idea."

Anyway, we soon said goodbye to Bill, as noted above.

And then Sarah spent the next ten minutes, as we sat in the waiting room, trying to make it clear to me why it was NOT funny for me to have told the nurse about the glove incident. [In fact, she requested that I edit this story to clarify the point she was actually making, and so I have edited the story, but since I still don't quite get the point she was making, my edit doesn't make sense, either, so let's all have another cup of coffee and meditate on why it isn't smart to post this early in the morning.]

Well, now it's 8:21 and we haven't been paged, so thank GOD all must be going well. My brother should be here soon from the NC coast--a three-hour drive, bless him!

All humorous anecdotes aside, THANK YOU ALL for the amount of praying you are doing, and for your love and care and thoughts. We FEEL IT.

I will post again when I know anything more.

Love...