30th Jan 2009 Friday
We arrived on time and sat around waiting. Jake was not in the mood for anything. He sat quietly waiting to see what was going to happen. He fought the weighing, which only requires sitting in a chair. The nurse suggested we give Jake some medicine before the operation to calm him down. He spat half of it out but he had swallowed a bit, so that and the fact that he was tired anyway meant that he slept in the recovery room where they put us while we waited. They then moved us over to the main theater.
There was some confusion just prior to the surgery - we thought he was going to get a port (which lies under the skin) and the surgeon thought he was getting a Hickman (which leaves two tubes out of a wound and needs to be taken care of much more carefully and flushed once a week). After clarifying we asked about what would happen later on and the surgeon informed me that when he is scheduled for the transplant he will have the port removed and the Hickman installed. This is good news because we thought he was going to have both in at the same time which would have meant one in each side of the neck.
Some trivia: there are 8 veins in the neck, 4 on each side. I forget the name of the vein, but they put Jake's into the left vein which is the first to bulge when people body build.
Anyway, Jake was asleep as we wheeled him into the operating theater. They let me walk in with them while Doug stayed outside. The anesthetist placed the gas mask on his face, and the second he felt it he woke and started struggling. It took 3 of us to restrain him while the anesthetist held the mask over his face. That has been the hardest moment for me. Jake turned to look at me and reached out his hand and called my name, while I had to hold him down and tell him to relax and that everything was ok!
Doug and I then went down and had breakfast at the cafe. We went back up and Doug went to the waiting room and I went up to the sixth floor to find out what was going to happen on Monday 2nd. I wanted to prepare myself and consider how I could prepare Jake. This turned out to be a good move because they had booked us in on Tuesday not Monday, and they had him down for something different, so I asked to meet with our coordinator so that I could get clarification. She organized it all and we finally got a copy of what was going to happen in the next phase.
I then went back to the waiting room to meet up with Doug. When I got there Rob (Grandpa) was there. We were called in soon afterwards and Jake was still sleepy. They informed us that he would be very groggy from the pre-op sedative. We waited the rest of the time at the day recovery unit, and they told us to take him home after we knew he had eaten something.
We made it home in the heat of the day and found the kitchen covered in ants. They need to get out of the heat too!