Wordswoman

Yesterday Dad was in surgery prep at 5:30 a.m. and wheeled away for surgery right on schedule at 7:30 a.m., but the surgeon didn't emerge to talk to us until almost 2:00 p.m. That's significantly longer than his first surgery, so we were scared and anxious that something had gone wrong (and also ravenously hungry, since we hadn't dared to leave the surgical waiting room). But the doctor was calm--surreally calm, in fact. There was this aura of "ho hum, just another day in the human brain" about him. Everything had gone fine, he said. It was a clean resection.

(This does not mean all cancer has been removed; that's not really possible with these aggressive tumors that send invisible tendrils out into the surrounding functional brain tissue. It just means that all the obviously abnormal tissue they could remove was cleanly removed, without complications.)

Just closing up after surgery takes a long time. They never show that part in the medical shows on TV; it's not dramatic, and it's not usually the star neurosurgeon doing it. Dad wasn't closed up and moved to recovery until 3:15 p.m., and we couldn't see him for a couple of hours after that, when he was moved to the ICU.  He looked dazed and exhausted, and who could blame him? Heck, I felt dazed and exhausted myself, and I didn't have anesthesia and a hole in my head. But however tired and pained, he sounded like himself when he spoke. He even tried to nag his wife into slipping him a couple of Extra-Strength Tylenol (she wouldn't) or a Tic-Tac (eventually she did) when the nurses weren't looking. Which is totally Dad, so it was oddly reassuring.

Around 8:00 p.m. we saw Dad's surgeon heading down the hall, interns trailing him like the tail of a comet. This would be the same neurosurgeon who talked to us at 7:00 a.m. and probably made his hospital rounds before that. He seemed pleased with Dad's condition.

My brother Perry and I stayed a couple of hours more, but since we'd gotten up at 4:00 a.m. we were fading fast. So around 8:30 p.m. we called it a night, went to dinner, and got home to bed. I barely remember lying down. I think my husband had to throw a blanket over me because I hadn't had the energy to do it myself.

We'll be heading back to the hospital soon, hoping to hear more of a report from the surgeon and/or pathology.