fenchurch | Yarr! It be Talk Like a Pirate, Surgery Day!

I'm really hoping the fact that I've gotten so little sleep in the last three days will make it easier for me to sleep on the way home. I finally decided, around 4:30 this morning, that I may as well just get up, seeing as how I'd been waking up nearly every hour anyway. Ugh. At this point, I'm willing to say that the worst part about all of this is not being able to drink anything after midnight... It's just barely 5:00 and I'd already kill for a glass of water.

We'll be leaving the hotel about 6:30 in order to get to the hospital a little before 7:00... and once I'm checked in, my mom and

rackham will head back to the hotel to get all checked out and probably go to breakfast... without me. I'm guessing I won't get to eat until around Noon or so, since my surgery isn't scheduled to start until 9:00 and my orthopaedic surgeon thought it would take around two hours.

Yesterday was filled with all the fun paperwork and pre-op stuff... they really have the whole thing down to a fairly smooth system here. First the meeting with the surgeon, then to Admitting, then Radiology and last to Day Surgery, where the rest of the people I had to talk to came to me (the lab tech for the blood work, the respiratory therapist, the physical therapist). Apparently, the bulk of the hospital's business comes from the orthopaedic surgeons I'm here to see... not surprising, given their reputation (they have enough people coming from out of town that the hotel we're staying at gives discounts to their patients).

The weirdest part, so far, is that the respiratory therapist told me to use my inhaler before I went to bed and after I woke up... do you know how *bizarre* it is to use an inhaler when you're not actually having any breathing problems? It just seems wrong...

I really am hoping that I'll be up to the drive home this evening (that would be Rackham driving, btw, NOT me... I don't get to drive again for about a month). They're going to be giving me the good stuff to take for pain, plus I'll apparently have a pain pump (which sounds like the exact opposite of what it is... like it's some sort of torture device: "Hook her up... to the Pain Pump!! *evil laughter*"). My mom was saying that the patients they've worked with at their PT clinic who have had this surgery here have all come home the same day... and since La Grande is also about a 4.5 hour drive away, that's a pretty good sign.