Anna's out of surgery

UPDATED: 2pm, see below

5:15am: awake. crap. You know you're up too early when the dragon hasn't even gone to bed yet. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. No time for breakfast, except for Zoe, who is confused by early food and not really awake yet either. Ready to go around 5:50am.

6:58am: sitting around the hospital's surgery check-in desk. Noticed some people walking around the neighbourhood at 6am with dogs, when driving out. Morning people - who can figure? It's bright at 6am, but with the clouds this morning, the streetlights were still on. annathepiper's sitting next to me, reading this bizarre horror-parody romance novel wherein a laid-off secretary becomes queen of the undead. I can't decide whether that's really funny or very sad.

The local netadmin has the wireless network open, but then blocks access via an ACL at some secondary level. Hopefully he's not just using the 802.11g ACL protection, since that's pretty easy to break. But it really shouldn't present itself as an open network - I wasn't even trying to join the LAN, it just showed up - if it isn't. Bad admin! Bad!

8:45am: Checked in at the waiting room desk. Time to camp out for a few hours. Anna wants me to ask Dr. Stickney if there's anything left of her thyroid at all after surgery. It's a pretty okay waiting area, tho' a little louder than I'd prefer. There are a lot of windows that all face east, and if you're right by the windows you get cell reception and they've added a WAP, finally, too. But I can't use it until 9am when the people who hand out the daily password get in. They also have those little table-reservation pagers like at restaurants; it'll blink if there's anything to tell me. But unlike the restaurant ones, it doesn't double as a coaster.

So there's not much of anything going on. Everybody keeps saying it'll be pretty much the same as last time. Anna's blood pressure is nice and low so they aren't worried about heart issues, either. I got something to eat for breakfast, finally, but they didn't really have much that was good for you, which is kind of ironic, being, you know, a hospital. Oh well.

9:22am: I got a password for the net. It works. It even allows non-web protocols so yay I can be on the MUSH. It's not very fast, tho'. but it works.

10:15am: buzzer. Anna's out of surgery. Now the post-op recovery-room wait, which can be two hours or more commonly. Haven't talked to Dr. Stickney yet tho' - I'll get buzzed again for that.

10:32: "A big ol' lump in there," hoping it's still benign. Won't know for a week until they do more testing, as always. "Everything went real smooth." The parathyroids seemed to be in good shape so there will probably be a calcium drop that will require supplements, either temporary or permanently. Probably temporarily but it could be permanent, it depends. Anna will probably to go to a room in 7SW, we'll hear more in about an hour.

Anna should be going home in the early afternoon tomorrow, but maybe not until after dinner if her parathyroids react badly.

2pm: I've been hanging around with Anna upstairs for the last hour and a half or so; she's dozing, feeling reasonably well, and on the happy drugs. Her voice isn't too bad - I think better than last time, actually, tho' I'm not sure - and she's alternating reading and sleeping. From a surgery standpoint, everything went well and there weren't any issues, and she hasn't seemed to have any bad reactions yet. Under her medication, she says it feels like an ordinary sore throat; they were going to up her meds just a bit to make sure that doesn't get out of control.

I'm having to head out to do some stuff that I need to do today now. Bug me for contact information if you want it.

I'll keep editing this as I have new information.

a selection of pictures before bedtime

Talked to Anna on the phone after dinner; she was awake for dinner and a little walking around, but was going to go right back to sleep and hopefully stay that way overnight, so I didn't go back in. She's gotten a couple of calls and is feeling pretty good. Her voice sounds better than she did after the first time she had to go through this, mostly in that it just doesn't seem to have been all that significantly affected.

In the parking garage at Swedish hospital, we parked here, which made me giggle:



This is one of the places we were told to wait before Anna went in and actually got operated on - I don't remember why I took this picture but I did:



Note that her feet have apparently been promoted to first sergeant sergeant sergeant sergeant sergeant major sergeant sergeant sergeant lt. general sergeant sergeant sergeant, first class.



In other news, here's that cherrywood windowseat bench I've been working on at 5038, upstairs in the master bedroom. Somebody tiled it in the 50s and all the tile had come up. This is leftover cherry salvaged from the end of someone else's job; I'm very happy with how it came out.



Here's a picture with the curtain straightened up:



It really kind of gives the room back that window. The various things that had been done to it over the years had made it less a feature and more a distraction. Now it's a feature again. ^_^

I've also taken a bunch more flower pictures. This is not one of them - it's from two or three rounds ago - but it's pretty. It's right next to our front stairs. I call it the Utena rose, because the colour's right:



And now I go to bed.