I am being wheeled into the operating room. It is not what I thought. The ceiling is only slightly taller than a standard room with a drop tile ceiling that you would see in an office building. The room is quite spacious with several what look like several mobile boxes filled with equipment. Several people are in the room, I can see the surgeon and other people dressed in green scrubs. The anesthesiologist and a nurse speak to me. They put electrodes on my chest. The anesthesiologist injects something into my IV… suddenly I feel like I have had 8 beer and am lying back on a lazy-boy… only now I am sitting up and they are inserting a needle into my spine… an epidural and I don’t care. Then I am on my back counting down and then darkness.
As my surgery date draws closer I find myself thinking about the last moments before having the Whipple surgery. I wonder if I fully appreciated the highly complex plumbing procedure that was about to be performed on me by a highly skilled team executing a superbly choreographed dance lasting six hours in length.
I’m not sure that I did. I mean I knew that it was essentially a high tech plumbing procedure whereby at the end I would be missing a few body parts… namely the head of my pancreas, my duodenum and my gallbladder. I got the result and didn’t want to think about the how it was done. Knowing that a surgeon who had choreographed and lead 750 of these dances was good enough for me.
And now with a colectomy less than a month away I find myself wanting to learn more. I want to know the choreography of the dance from four years ago and I want to see behind the curtain of the dance to come that will be performed within the theatre of my body. Yes I am curious AND I think knowing the choreography will help my body give a deeper level of permission to the surgical team to do the job they need to do.
These were my thoughts a week ago when I found a couple of videos on youtube of a Whipple and a colectomy being performed. Note: they are definitely not for the squeamish. I am also not sure if the colectomy in the video is the same type of colectomy that I will have. Either way if you are curious have a look.
As my surgery date draws closer I find myself thinking about the last moments before having the Whipple surgery. I wonder if I fully appreciated the highly complex plumbing procedure that was about to be performed on me by a highly skilled team executing a superbly choreographed dance lasting six hours in length.
I’m not sure that I did. I mean I knew that it was essentially a high tech plumbing procedure whereby at the end I would be missing a few body parts… namely the head of my pancreas, my duodenum and my gallbladder. I got the result and didn’t want to think about the how it was done. Knowing that a surgeon who had choreographed and lead 750 of these dances was good enough for me.
And now with a colectomy less than a month away I find myself wanting to learn more. I want to know the choreography of the dance from four years ago and I want to see behind the curtain of the dance to come that will be performed within the theatre of my body. Yes I am curious AND I think knowing the choreography will help my body give a deeper level of permission to the surgical team to do the job they need to do.
These were my thoughts a week ago when I found a couple of videos on youtube of a Whipple and a colectomy being performed. Note: they are definitely not for the squeamish. I am also not sure if the colectomy in the video is the same type of colectomy that I will have. Either way if you are curious have a look.