Diary of an Emotional Husband

What?  Two blog entries by Andrew in a single day?  There must be some whack stuff going on these days that require me to manage the cyberspace informational portal!  Well, as you all well know, there is some stuff going on.  I am sure if you are reading this, you may have seen a post or two regarding the topic at hand and know what the deal is.

Well, the day of Carrie's surgery has come and gone.  It felt like an eternity for this day to get here, but for some reason it sneaked up on us faster than we could blink and get things ready for.  It has been a roller coaster of emotions for everyone involved in this, let alone what Carrie must be thinking (other than she probably has a massive f***ing headache right now!).  For me, this has been the scariest thing I have ever dealt with.  But, as I've been told multiple times by several people "There is nowhere to go but up now!"  

Today has been one of the longest days I've had in quite a while.  It started out getting here around 10am.  We checked in with registration, got our tazer (the buzzer/notifier thingy) and sat on down.  My Dad and Carrie's Mom and Dad chilled out with us for a while during the wait.  It didn't take long for them to call Carrie back for pre-op prepping.  I was able to go back with her and keep her company while they prepped her.  After they prepped her, the Mother and Fathers came back to hang for another trip down eternity of time.  Got to see Carrie go through the medicine induced drunkenness to start the anesthesia process.  There was plenty of inappropriate comments and jokes made, but we wouldn't expect anything less than that.

Things ran long, but they finally kicked us out around 1:30 to take her back to start poking more holes in her skin and veins to plug in more IV's and monitors.  We all left the building for a short lunch break since we knew the procedure wouldn't get started right away.  About 2:40, my Dad was back at the waiting room and got the page saying they had just wheeled her back into the operating room.  We hauled ass finishing lunch and skee-dattled back to the waiting room.

And we sat.  And sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat.  And sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat.  And sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat.  And sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat.  And sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat.  And sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat.  Then, around 6pm, my cell phone started ringing.  It was the nurse from the Operating Room calling to give us an update.  Apparently, the nurse from the first shift was supposed to have called us with an update, but that did not happen.  No biggie.

 Apparently, the procedure did not actually start until 4pm, due to other things they had to setup.  They weren't sure if they were halfway or not.  She said that everything was going great and Carrie was doing fantastic through it all so far.  So, then there is more waiting.  It started to dawn on me that they called it a waiting room for a reason.  Well, as it turns out, we were the last ones in the waiting room.  Everyone else had gotten to go the heck out of Dodge already.  We were all fidgeting with phones and computers and starting blankly at the TV screen.

During all of this waiting and fidgeting, I was playing with the MRI scan data and was able to convert Carrie's images to a 3-D CAD file!  I still have some work to do, but if I remove the bone structures from the picture that you see here, her brain will be fully imaged in 3 dimensional wonderful glory.  I hope to build a scale model of her brain on my equipment at work!

 

I was even able to find the tumor in the converted MRI data.  It is probably hard to see, but it is pretty close to dead center on the picture, maybe lightly to the right of center:

That at least kept me entertained for a while!  As time marched on, things started to get more real.  All of a sudden, we looked up at the status board and Carrie's surgery slot changed from yellow to red, which mean the surgery was over!  It then quickly changed to blue, which meant she was no longer in the O.R.  A few minutes later, Dr. Grossi showed up in the waiting room.  He said the surgery went perfectly according to plan.  Everything was as they were expecting it to be.  There were no surprises when they went in there.  They removed from just behind the tumor up to the temporal tip.  

Carrie then had a post-op CT to confirm there was no additional bleeding in the surgery site.  It was clean.  We then moved up to the ICU waiting room.  We hung out there for a while.  Next thing you know a bed stops in front of the waiting room door and a nurse asks to see us.  They had Carrie.  She was being taken to ICU after her CT.

That is when Shit Just Got Really Really Real for me.  It was hard for me to see her in that condition even though I know it was for the best to get rid of that damn tumor.  I felt completely powerless and helpless, but I...we....all know that it is the best thing that could have happened right now.  They got her setup in the ICU room and there she lays.  It has been hard not to get teary eyed over the whole thing just looking at her.  She is my everything and I want it all to be better right now.  Everything is on the way up from here, though, so please don't ever let me forget that. 

Let the recovery begin.