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“How are we doing this morning?”I asked as I walked through the curtain into the room where Mrs. Elliot sat on her bed. She was dressed for surgery and hooked up to the IV already, but she didn’t look at all happy about being there.
“You ready to get better?” I asked her.
“It’s another surgery. You know as well as I do that this is likely not going to be the last one. I’ll get better, then I’ll get sick, and it’ll keep going on and on and on,” she said.
“Cheer up now!” I told her as I patted her on the knee. “I know you don’t want to go through the recovery process with this, but trust me when I tell you that you’re going to feel a lot better when you reach the other side of the recovery process. You’ll be running around like you’re fifteen again.”
“I don’t know about that. Just know that no matter what happens, you’re going to do a great job in there,” she said.
“And you will, too,” I told her with a smile. “Now if you are all ready to go, I’m going to head back to the OR so I can get some things prepped, and we’ll get this thing knocked out.”
“I wish I had your energy so early in the morning,” Mrs. Elliot said. “But you won’t let me have coffee or nothing before surgery, so I’m not in the best of moods.”
“You can have a huge cup of coffee when you wake up, okay?” I asked her.
She gave me a grumpy nod, and I smiled to myself as I walked back to the OR.
I knew she wasn’t happy about the surgery, but I also felt confident she was going to be a lot better when it was done and over with. It wasn’t an easy recovery, that was a known fact for anyone who dealt with this, but it was only a matter of weeks and things got easier.
She would be under the care of a medical team all day, every day, and though she would be stuck in bed watching tv or resting, that didn’t mean that it wasn’t worth it going through with this right now.
I spoke with my team when I walked into the operating room, and I was pleased to see that we had almost everything set up and ready to go. It was a much better start to the week than I had had the week before, and I felt that was a good sign.
Things were going to have to start looking up now, and with a good day under my belt today, perhaps I would feel more confident about thinking about that job offer. With this surgery looming over my head for as long as it had been, I knew that could be part of the reason why I hadn’t wanted to deal with the offer right when it was handed over to me.
I was stressed about doing the surgery even though I had done it so many times before. I just didn’t want to make this any harder on Mrs. Elliot than it would be naturally, and I worried about her attitude about the entire thing. It was a known fact that those who were positive about their health and treatment of their disease did a lot better overall than those who had given up, and I felt like she was right on the verge of giving up.
It was frustrating that there wasn’t a thing I could do for her to pull her out of that. I just had to support her as best as I could while she was here. And right now, I felt the best I could support her was to do my best in the surgery and make sure she would be as pain free as possible when she woke up.
I put on the rest of my suit as a couple other members of the team also finished preparing for the surgery, and Mrs. Elliot was wheeled in on her bed. She was talking with the nurses and they helped her get onto the other table for the procedure, and I came over to give her one last word of encouragement before she went under the anesthetic.
She seemed to be in better spirits when she was finally in the OR and on the table, which made me feel better about the outcome of the surgery.
“I’ll see you in a few hours, okay?” I told her.
“Oh, take your time. I’ve got nowhere to be,” she said. Several members of the team laughed at her, and we set to work. It was all routine for this sort of thing, and I naturally settled in. I was confident in the team I had working with me that morning, and I felt even though I had to do the surgeries that day, it wasn’t going to be too hard of a shift with the crew I had working with me.
We were all experienced in the OR, and we all knew what we were doing with years of experience. It was just a matter of going through the motions now that we were actually in the OR and dealing with a patient on the table.
For the first part of the surgery, the procedure went well. Things were going just as expected, and I felt we were moving right on schedule. I had to be careful not to move too quickly. I didn’t want to miss anything while we were inside. But, I also wasn’t going to take my time as she had said, either.
I didn’t want her under the anesthesia any longer than necessary, and I knew with this being the hardest procedure of the day, it would also be the most stressful. I wanted to get that out of the way as soon as possible, too. It was part of what I did as a doctor, but the surgeries were my least favorite part. I knew the human body well, but I hated knowing all the things that could go wrong while I was inside a living being.
We had to be so careful with life. It was so precious. For as resilient as the human body was through many things it endured, there were other things that put it into perspective just how fragile life really is. It really wouldn’t take much for something to go wrong with any of the surgeries I performed, and if I thought about that side of things too much, I couldn’t concentrate.
Overall, odds were in my favor that this would be routine, and everything would be fine. That was how all the surgeries that day were supposed to be.
But, things don’t always go as planned, and the alert on the machine told me that there was something not quite right with how the procedure was going. I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions with the warning on the machine, but I did ask my monitors to keep an eye on things. They responded that they heard me, and I kept an eye on the machine myself as I continued with the surgery.
There was a part of me that wondered if it would be a good idea to close her up and end it now, but there was another part of me that said it would be harder on her to do that and have her come back for yet another surgery in a few months than it would be to just go through with the rest of the procedure now. I was nearly done, and if I could keep moving at this pace, she would be ready to go back to the recovery section in less than fifteen minutes.
But, the alert on the machine chimed again, and I looked over to my nurses.
“How are we doing over there?” I asked.
“Her blood pressure is dropping,”
I was hoping to hear something encouraging about how they were going to take care of things and I was doing fine, but that announcement made my own blood run cold. For her blood pressure to be dropping meant that something was wrong, and it was getting worse faster than we were able to track.
