My Anaesthetist

So today I was suppose to have the surgery on my wrist. Key word of that sentence - 'suppose to'. Lets run through my day. Alarm goes of at 3am to get up and drive my mum to the airport where she is flying to France to go meet my dad and my brother. Get home and start prepping for the day - washing, dishes, packing, repacking, packing one more time, emptying the bins...doing all the things that I know I'm not going to want to do when I get home from hospital.

At 5am I eat breakfast and then head off to teach my boxing class for the morning. I was to admit to hospital at 11am, so I continued getting stuff done around the house until my God Mother arrive to pick me up and drive me to hospital.

Admission all went to plan, very much uneventful and no complications. I was second on the list, expecting to go in at around 2.30/3pm. So I got some online work done, I read a book, I wrote lists...I was productive. Around 3pm an orderly comes to take me into holding...woooo!! Do the second lot of checks just before the Anaesthetist comes in.

'Bad news' he says. Jeff (my surgeon) has decided he wants to scope your wrist as well (have no idea what that means) and to do that we need a piece of equipment that needs to be sterilised for you. That's happening now, so we are going to move you to last on the list, which will be around 6pm. Awesome.

So I get taken back to my room, they have to go find my bag which had been taken to my ward room and I had another three hours to kill. Pinterest did me well in that time. So did a couple of friends I was chatting to. The nurses came and took me to the bathroom every hour on the hour ... 'you'll be going in soon' they said. 7pm rolled around, still there. All the nurses had finished they shifts and were literally just waiting around for me to go, well and truly the last one to be waiting.

7.20 the Anaesthetist powers into my room, pulls up a chair and says 'more bad news'. An emergency case had just come in - he is on the table now and has a seriously messed up hand from a metal grinding injury - tendons, muscle, bone, arterty...it was going to take them a good 5-6 hours which would be around 11pm. I had a choice. I could wait and they would take me in there, provided they had enough staff and resources, which he thought they had, or I could move it to tomorrow at South Perth Hospital and he promised I would be the first one through.

I don't know if I was tired, stressed, worried, over it or all of the above but burst into tears. The obvious thing to do for me was to go home. I wanted out of there and I didn't want tired staff working on my hand which is going to make or break my career. And I wanted to give this guy on the table the best possible chance of saving his hand without the over pressure of them pushing through to get to me.

You could see it in his face how terribly sorry he was to pushed me around all over the place today and he went and made the calls there and then to get me into South Perth tomorrow. A friend came and picked me up and took me home, where really I probably got as little sleep as I did the night before. But I am up and packed and fasted again - round two!!