As I type this, I'm sitting in a recliner that will double as my bed this evening, on the fifth floor of St. Thomas Medical Center in Belle Meade, watching my lovely and courageous wife, Amina, go in and out of sleep. The tick-click of the IV machine helps drown the background noise of nurses shuttling to and fro, doing the work of the angels as they keep Amina and the rest of the A wing as comfortable as possible, given the planned trauma their bodies suffered earlier in the day.
(Sorry for the scenery chewing, but I'm feeling a bit melodramatic this evening. It's been a long day.)
We stayed at The Inn at St. Thomas, a wing of the hospital that's been converted to motel rooms where patients can stay the night before surgery, to avoid the 5:30 a.m. arrival that admissions requires.
We thought that 5:30 is 5:30, so we were ready at that ungodly hour. But if you're at the Inn, you've got at least an extra 90 minutes until they actually pick you up. And we got up an hour earlier than we needed to – 3:30 a.m. – out of excitement and nervousness. So by the time Amina was taken out of the room, we'd been up for almost four hours. A tense four hours.
I tried to keep my day as normal as possible, visiting clients and generally pretending that Amina was at a customer site and wouldn't be home until after dinner. The physician assistant called at 11 a.m. to say the first incision was made around 10:15 a.m., and that they were looking at every bit of six hours before they'd be done.
Consider that for a second – a six hour surgery. For a knee, when most ACL repair is done outpatient. I don't think any of us realized how drastic the injury was in the first few days after it happened.
Anyway.
I got to the family waiting room around 3 p.m. and the PA called immediately to say all was going well, but that they'd need at least another hour before Dr. Anderson would be finished. And she was pretty much correct – I got the call at 4:15 p.m. that Dr. Anderson was ready to see me and give me the news.
I pretended not to be nervous. Causally I gathered my laptop and charger (free wifi kicks ass when you've got nothing but time on your hands) and was escored to the little waiting room. I sat down, the door was shut and boom! No cell coverage. I suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, had a lot of time to think and worry. I prayed as best I could, but I think God will forgive me for being a bit scatterbrained, as I went from "Everything is going to be fine" to "She'll probably have lost her leg due to the arterial damage" to "Why the hell can't I get on Twitter? It's baseball trading deadline!"
Dr. Anderson almost bounced into the room. He had a hint of a smile that grew larger as he told me everything went as well as he'd hoped. The damage was bad – we were hoping he'd get in there and find less destruction than expected – and he showed me one gross photo of her knee as it was opened, and another kind of cool photo that showed the extent of the damage Amina had done.
To the untrained eye, it's hard to decipher, but let me try:
First, imagine that you don't have kneecap anymore. Then take a deck of cards, and imagine sliding it into the space where your kneecap was, kind of perpendicular to your leg. That's what I saw – her knee looked like a hollow little cave. There was no "there" there.
And now, miraculously, there is. The LCL and one of her middle ligaments were taken from her body, and the other middle ligament was cadaver tissue. Thus she only has half a zombie knee, which should be cool around Halloween. We can scare the kids and the insurance company at the same time.
I can't say enough about how incredible Dr. Anderson has been for us. It was the right choice, and I'm so incredibly glad we got to him when we did – we'd all but made our decision to go with another doctor, but he called us at home, on his day off, to say that he'd seen Amina's charts and would get us in the very next afternoon. He came recommended to us by Dr. Jeff Cook at the Franklin Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine, who was recommended to us by very good friends in our neighborhood. It's like a Kevin Bacon story.
Amina resting comfortably, though the pain medication seems to wear out every three hours. I've got my phone alarm clock set to go off every 2:45, so that I can make sure I get the nurse's attention. I don't think that's going to be hard – so far I've been blown away by the care we've received. Our first nurse just happened to live in our neighborhood, which is kind of mind-blowing when you've already been up for 14 hours and you're living on caffeine and Doritos. Our overnight nurse is a free spirit, kind of spunky and not afraid to swear if the conversation demands it.
And, of course, the free wifi.
God bless you all for the help you've given us, the love you've shown us, and the prayers you've made made for us. It's amazing to me that I find myself praising God, and my friends and family, even in the midst of what should be a pretty crappy day.
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