Operation Totally Successful!

It was long day. I don’t know how Aunt Kay held up, but I was a wreck. You know, that hospital thing. They put you in a waiting room and proceed to get your loved one ready for surgery in some other mysterious area of the hospital. Hours later you’re worrying about why you haven’t heard anything since someone told you 3 hours ago that he was going into surgery. It was supposed to take only an hour and a half. When you finally find somebody who will help, you learn that he is still in pre-op, waiting for the surgeon. So after hours of waiting, we find him still in pre-op. I think he’s now been nearly 24 hours without food or water and how ridiculous that is. He says he’s doing just fine. Been napping on and off and listening to the activity around him. We try to get an update on the expected time of his surgery, but no one seems to know. After a while someone comes over and informs us that the surgeon has had to tend to an emergency at the other hospital and will probably be tied up for 3 or 4 hours. Apparently that was old news because 20 minutes later someone else comes in and says that the doctor is on his way. There are too many people in his little cubicle, so we all decide to leave and return to the surgical waiting room. These people can’t even communicate and organize well enough to get their stories straight to tell you whether he’s still in pre-op, still in surgery, in recovery, on his way into surgery or some other option. And yet you have to trust them to have their systems working well enough to work together to cut open someone’s body!
Of course after we leave pre-op we have no way of knowing if the surgeon really shows up, if he is now in surgery, or what. After a few more hours, we decide that it’s “tea” time (North American style) and I get sent out to procure the wine and cheese. By the time I get back, Aunt Kay has been told that he is out of surgery, in post-op and that everything went well. We will be able to see him in a while. We have time for our wine and cheese in the waiting room first.
Uncle Nello looks great! You’d never know he just had surgery! You’d certainly never know that he’s over 80 (considerably over 80 actually!).
While we wait in the hall outside his 2-bed room to be able to see him, a nurse walks up to us and starts asking Gene questions about the patient’s normal medications. The only trouble is that she’s asking about the other patient in the room. Comforting, huh? Don’t ever go into a hospital without somewhere there at all times to look after your needs. That’s what they do in Spain. A family member is there at all times. Uncle Nello will not like me saying anything negative about his hospital or the staff because he believes that his surgeon and everyone else associated with him are perfect. I’m certain that his surgeon is great. He did a great job on Uncle Nello. But the organization (or lack thereof) in hospitals terrifies me. Not just this hospital. All hospitals. From what I’ve seen, they are all confused.
But right now we are all just totally relieved that everything went well and that we can take him home in the morning. In spite of my fears for the system, medical science is a wondrous thing.