Waiting is hard

It hasn’t been a typical Tuesday morning. Dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, instead of dress shirt and tie, waiting.

Not fun!

The only typical thing this morning is the five shot Americano with caramel.

Tom Petty’s “Waiting” plays in my ears. It’s a fitting song.

“It’s the hardest part.”

“Surgery will take three to six hours,” the doctor said.

It’s a little after 9 a.m. and I’m watching people pass by the cafeteria at the University of Colorado Medical Center in Aurora.

I don’t really know how I’m feeling right now. It’s a mix of confidence that God is in control and a touch of fear. A lot of loneliness as I type words that might never get published.

My wife, Linda, is upstairs drugged up and going under the knife. Me, I’m drinking my five shot Americano, watching people go by, listening to music and typing.

I’ve let our daughters know their mother has been taken back. One is in Kearney, Nebraska. The other is in sunny Arizona.

Since I’m in Colorado, I could take Tom’s advice and “roll another joint,” but I’ll pass on that one. So, I wait, pray and write.

“The waiting is the hardest part.”

If you have had a loved one go into surgery you can relate. The nervous wait.

There were 51.4 million surgeries done in America, according the CDC statistics from 2010. The kind of surgery Linda is having, there were 480,000 done.

My phone begins ringing.

I pull out the earphones and answer.

“Brad, this is Sarah, Linda’s OR nurse.”

The surgery had started. Linda was doing great, she said. “I’ll give you a call in a couple of hours if we are still in surgery.”

According to Healthgrades, the most common surgery, is cataract removal, while C-section is number two and joint replacement comes in at number three. Linda’s surgery comes in at number eight.

I wish she was having the number one surgery, that one sounds a lot easier.

Whenever you go in for surgery, no matter what kind, there is risk. However, one big plus, Linda’s surgery doesn’t even make the top 10 list of riskiest medical procedures, according to a story with Healthcare Business and Technology. That dubious honor, if you could call it that, goes to craniectomy (brain surgery). surgical ventricular restoration is number two and spinal osteomyelitis surgery, soronary revascularization, bladder cystectomy, esophagectomy, thoracic aortic dissection repair, pancreatectomy, septal myotomy and at number 10 is Bariatric surgeries/gastric bypass.

Linda’s surgery is not on the list, so I can breathe a slight sigh of relief, but I still wait.

“Predicting the duration of a surgical case is a bit like predicting the duration of a sports competition,” according to Medscape.com. Like a sports competition, “a surgical case can go into overtime if unexpected findings force a change in the surgical procedure that requires extra time.”

Before Linda went in, the doctor said that was why they gave such a wide range of time, three to six hours. It was hard to tell.

“Surgical case durations are stochastic (or random, from the Greek word for “aim” or “guess”), a term that indicates that the next state is determined both by the process’s predictable actions and by a random element,” Medscape.com explained.

So, I wait on the stochastic to play out.

Four hours after Linda went in, I was called into a conference room.

Everything went OK, but scar tissue from cancer treatment 30 years earlier caused problems. Everything would be OK, but she would have to stay in the hospital for six to seven days.

The day ended next to the bed, holding my wife’s hand and waiting, for the days to again become typical.