8/4/11

Hello all! Today I was scheduled for an anterior cervical decompression and fusion (ACDF) at 11 AM at the VA Hospital. I got there around then and Sylvia Haase and I looked into the OR room that we were scheduled to be in. The room was still in use by the surgeon and team who had booked it for the first surgery of the day so we knew we would be waiting for a while....for the surgeon to finish the surgery, close, and the clean up crew to get everything ready for the next surgery.

Sylvia and I headed into the staff lounge and hung out and talked for a bit over an hour. Finally we heard on the intercom the call for the clean up staff for our OR room. We started to set up about 20 minutes later when the staff was finished cleaning. Everything was running smoothly until the patient was put to sleep, and then the neurosurgeon resident noticed that the consent form had the wrong levels listed on it! It was determined that we could not carry on with surgery without waking the patient and getting consent for the proper levels, so we had to pack everything up and plan to come back tomorrow morning. The poor patient was woken up only to find that she had not undergone surgery, but that she would have to stay the night in the hospital and have the surgery first thing in the morning.

I feel so happy and blessed to have family and friends who love and care about me :) I've made a little wall with all my letters and cards on it (3 as of now to be exact!) One more to come...I got a letter from Jessica on Friday (8/5) that I haven't put up yet. So far I have a card from Aunt Sexy, Cara Shrontz, and Andrew Harrington.

I went to the Apple store and got a new phone cover to go with my brand new white iphone4! I LOOOVE IT! It is Kate Spade, the same style as Courtney Pustejovsky's, except hers is pink with white polka dots :)....oh and btw I have a new phone number so text my old one if you don't have it yet and I will give it to you!!!

Since I was already in Denver for the case, I met Danny downtown after his case. We walked around and checked stuff out while it was still daylight.

Around 8-8:30 PM the sun starts to set in Denver. We headed to 1-up, an old school arcade bar with old fashioned video games from Pacman to Donkey Kong, skeeball, and pinball. On the back patio they have "giant jenga" sets and we played a few games of that as well as the arcade games! It was a lot of fun, and a good way to de-stress.