A long day for Shirley has ended successfully. Her surgery was originally scheduled for 1:15 this afternoon and in the early morning she was quite anxious. The thought of waiting for many more hours was weighing heavy on her. Then, just around 10 am, the nurse got a call that the operating room was available early and she was quickly rushed downstairs.
We were told that the OR had been reserved from four hours--but that it shouldn't take nearly that long. She was wheeled out of Pre-Op around 11:00. I then ran off to to try in vain to locate my cell phone that I had lost last night. I returned to the hospital and did a couple of conference calls that ran until nearly 4:00. At that time, I ran down to the Surgical Waiting Room where they have a monitor showing that status of each surgical patient. It showed that she was in a recovery room, so I headed over there to see her. The receptionist told me that she had been in surgery until 3:40 and at that time was not yet awake.
I was allowed to see her around 4:40 and she was awake but groggy. I spoke to the general surgeon who did the laparoscopy. She said that Shirley's gall bladder was quite swollen and that there were "lots" of stones. She was concerned enough that they brought in a liver specialist to review things and they considered abandoning the laparoscopy in favor of an open incision. In the end, they were able to get the gall bladder out and did some sort of trace that confirmed that there were no stones "downstream" that would cause further problems.
In addition to the gall bladder removal, the Cardio Thoracic team was doing a final clean-out and close of her clam shell incision. I didn't speak with the CT docs, but the general surgeon reported that they had filed down the one rib that had kept one spot from completely closing and then had sutured over this spot. I'll get the first-hand report in the morning.
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