Sitting around all day waiting for the procedure to implant a defibrillator into the husband’s chest and pretending to be patient even though the surgery starts four hours after the time it was supposed to start is utterly exhausting.
We arrived at 8 AM, which was when we were told to arrive and his surgery was scheduled for 10:30. They didn’t wheel him out of the pre-op room until 2:30. By 2:30 I felt like I could explode into a giant rainbow splatter like the colored foam that hits the car when you go to the drive-through car wash.
According to the husband’s surgeon everything went off smoothly and without a hitch. They are keeping him for one night which makes me very happy since he’s not allowed to move his arm and I would prefer the nurses be responsible for restraining him. He is quite the active sleeper.
He will be discharged tomorrow on prophylactic antibiotics. I will have to watch this Allien bump on his chest where the defibrillator was implanted and his wound for signs of infection. I don’t want to see him being jolted if he should require the defibrillator to do it’s job. In my imagination I can see every actor pretending to have a seizure lying on the ground and uncontrollably shaking and I think that’s what it might look like. But I don’t really know. And I don’t want to know.
The doctor tells me that only one out of seven patients who have a defibrillator implanted in their chests ever really need the defibrillator to shock them back to life. They don’t know how to determine which patients will need them or can get by without them so they just put the devices in all the patients whose hearts are failing in the same way that the husband‘s heart is failing.
My friend who is a hospice nurse told me that often times when people are in hospice and it is clear that they are dying they ask not to have their defibrillators turned off. They feel that the even though they are in hospice they still want their defibrillator to work. I’m not sure why I shared this with the husband but at least today he seemed think that it would be silly for someone in hospice not to turn off their defibrillator. The doctor told me he also wished he had a crystal ball
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