According to Dr. Hunter yesterday, surgery may take 2-3 hours, depending on how fast they can get results back from the lymph nodes they're extracting during the procedure. After surgery, Mike will be in recovery (from the anesthesia) for a couple of hours. On Friday, he was out of recovery in an hour, but then again, he was only under for about 15 minutes for that procedure. He'll be under for a lot longer this time, so I am expecting it will take longer for him to recover.
We (current set: me, Mom, Jen and Ray) are in the Family Waiting Room on the first floor of the Alfred building. Some time in the next few hours, probably when Mike is out of surgery and in recovery, he'll be assigned a room, and we'll move to the Family Waiting Room near there.
Some notes on the FWR experience... here at Alfred 1, there are three TVs with the sound off but closed captioning turned on. At this time of day, we have a two different news channels and a soap opera. This is an upgrade from earlier, when one of the news channels was running long-form infomercials. it makes me miss the House marathon from Friday, honestly.
The room itself is pretty nice - decent chairs, about half-full at this point. There is a monitor showing the status of patients (they use ID numbers to protect privacy, two vending machines (one Pepsi and one snacks), magazines, games and puzzles. Ray has set his sights on a 550-piece number.
As long as I'm talking about the experience, it's ranting time.
The Mayo St. Mary's Campus approach to numbering floors has some crazy in it. If you step into an elevator, you'll see buttons for G, M and 1. I think that's Ground, Main and First floors - all of which are synonyms for "the primary ground-level floor of the building." Not at Mayo St. Mary's, though. M is the ground-level floor, G is the basement, and 1 is what you and I would think of as the second floor (unless you're European, in which case you'd think of it as the first floor).
And what is up with the room labels? Outside the door of every patient room, here is a small plate that reads something like "Al 1-204" and immediately below it a much larger plate reading "Alfred 1-204". I don't see why the small plate is needed...
- Kevin
*When I started writing this, that is. It was 11:38, if I recall correctly.
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2 comments:
We're up to three channels of soap opera now. The bad acting is truly amazing.
Don't get too hung up on elapsed time while he's in surgery. J was in much longer than we had been told, but it was for the good. We were starting to get unnecessarily anxious.
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