Had to arrive at the hospital at 5:30 at the morning. Requested hotel wake up call for 4:30 am, and then requested it a second time just to verify that I would get the call. Did not sleep much last evening, so by 4:15 was awake anyway.
Waited in bed .... 4:30 .... 4:40, and nope, no wake up call from the hotel staff. As I left, I asked why, and they said their wake up system was not automatic and someone had to be emailed so to call the customer personally, and something wrong with the mailing system bla, bla bla. Thinking to myself, what if I just slept until noon ????
Arrived at the hospital at 5:45. Taken immediately to the 5th floor. Nurse put in an antibiotic IV in my forearm. When it was finally inserted properly I commented: "Wow, surgery is already done ... See Ya, thanks." Good laugh. Knowing that they're strict about no eating food since last night, midnight, I offered to order and share a pepperoni pizza with the staff so long as I could have it before the surgery.
Doctor Clavell came by. Nice conversation. He commented that I'm quite girthy and that the Titan would work well for me. Asked him whether I would get the Genesis or One Touch. He recommended the One Touch, stating that the Genesis had problems with the materials recently, and he has had better reliability with the One Touch. I told him I heard that One Touch had a larger pump. He showed me the two pumps side to side. The pumps were the nearly identical in size. The difference was the top of the pump at the deflation valve. The part where the deflation is, the One Touch is just slightly larger. He stated that if I wanted the Genesis, he would install that. I responded that the One Touch is fine.
Surgery was over before I knew it. Woke up. Near zero pain, just groggy. Doctor came by. All I remember is that we had a nice conversation about ...... something. However, I have not a clue what we were talking about. Just remember mentioning to him that instead of all this icky operating stuff, as cutting, suturing, stitches, and other messes, it better would be to use the Star Trek transporter beam and beam the Titan into its place. He responded with "Beam me up Scotty." Beyond that dialog, I was too out of it to remember anything else we spoke about.
Was in the hospital until 3:20. The issues I had was that my mouth was extremely dry. Was told this was from the antibiotics. Also constantly kept having to pee, and yet little came out.
I have decided to just stay in the hotel all day today and tomorrow. The reason is the dressing. The doctor had put a massive dressing all around that I am suppose to wear for two days. It is tight. I'm worried that if I go outside, it will become itchy. Also perhaps it'll become infected it becomes too sweaty in hot, humid Houston.
So tonight just ordered a pepperoni pizza and have plenty of snacks to keep me happy for the now. It's now about 11:pm. On a scale of 1 to 10, pain level is less than 1. Actually, it's near zero. The doctor gave me lots of pain killers, knowing that I must fly 12.5 hours to Tokyo on Friday (actually it's more like 18 hours door to door). The only problem is that even now I keep having to pee, like twice an hour, and little comes out. I think this is due to the dressing being too tight. Need to contact the doctor tomorrow.
Just took these pictures of the dressing.
- image_1.jpg (61.18 KiB) Viewed 1051 times
- image.jpg (57.14 KiB) Viewed 1051 times