Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a, um, sailboat?

One of the last things I remember before going in for surgery two weeks ago was one of the OR nurses (who in my mind has become Cheryl Wheeler) asking me "so, honey, you getting a Mercedes or a Chevy" in the inside reference that would only make sense to a liver-transplant patient...

I looked at her and said "oh no, I get a sailboat!" And thus the eventual landscape of my abdomen was discussed in the parlance of pre-opp.

The "Mercedes" incision, as I understand it, used to be the typical incision for liver transplantation:Now there is the more commonly-used "Chevrolet" incision:
Picture the intersection of the two lines about an inch or two above the navel, and no circle around the mercedes (duh).

Now, I expect to do a better graphic later, but ..... drum roll, please ..... I give you the HMS Shirley:
Where the grey line is previous surgery from 20-odd years ago (so old, so, so, old...).

So I have all this newfound respect for women who've had c-sections, and anyone else who's had that transverse abdominal incision -- ugh!!

But the worst part of it all is that Janice Joplin has been song-worming her way through my head for - let's see - about 10 days now and I cannot make her leave.

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