Episode 8: Waiting Room Spiral

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify

You know the quote about watching the pot and water boiling. It applies to watching a surgery board as well. 

In the hospitals we have been at,  they give you a number and there is a board in the waiting room you watch. This is where you get updates on the progress of your loved one’s surgery. 

It’s frustrating, anxiety producing, and just overall sucks!

If you’ve listened to the episodes before this you now know that information is a way I try to control my surroundings. lt’s how I coped with my husbands cancer. So having a board as the only source of information for hours was the worst case scenario for me. 

Let’s start at the beginning.   

My husband needed his entire thyroid to be removed in the hopes that they could remove all of the cancer. They scheduled the surgery for early in the morning and of course you need to be there earlier than that. The fact that we lived an hour away from the hospital and having to be prepared for a hospital stay made it difficult to fall asleep the night before.

So I packed up things to keep me entertained - naively thinking I would be able to focus on anything. I was ready for the day!  It’s funny to remember how I thought I had it all covered. My sister and my in-laws were at my house so I at least didn’t have to worry about my daughter or anything at the house while we were away. 

So, you wait anxiously in a waiting room for them to call you to be prepped. There’s a lot of squirming and hand holding and communicating with your eyes the things you don’t want to say. A couple of “things will be ok” and reassuring phrases that just come out. Then they call you back and you joke around with the nurses and try to make light of the fact that you are having a pretty sizable piece of your body removed in order to try to extend your life. 

But then… then they get ready to take him to the operating room and give you a number on a card. It felt like the longest freaking number in the world. It was a six digit number! Why!?? Why does the number need to be so long? Imagine you trying to keep track of a six digit number on an electronic board full of 6 digit numbers !

They gave me this six digit number and then they let me know it was time to say goodbye. The last thing he always does is give me his wedding ring. It always kills me. It feels like he’s telling me - it’s going to be ok but just in case this is a piece of me to go along with you. I take the ring and then try to find a place to put it where I won’t lose it because it’s too big for me to wear. The stress of doing that usually helps me keep it all together. Then we give each other one last kiss and they wheel him away. Even though the nurse has given me instructions on how to get to the waiting room I walk directly to the last bathroom we passed on our way there (that I had already made a mental note of) and cry. Then a couple of minutes in I realize how much I hate public bathrooms especially in hospitals and I pull it all together again and make my way down to the waiting room. I of course have to ask people how to get there because the nurse didn’t hand me a map and my brain had no capacity to listen to her directions. 

I get to the waiting room and scope out the place. Where can I sit where I can see the board but still have some personal space? Don’t want to be right in front of it because then there would be too much traffic  -  but apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought of that because by then,  all the prime real estate had been taken up. Little did I know almost all of those people would be gone way before me. 

I checked for his number and it showed he was still being prepped. I figured I had a little bit of time because the surgery wasn’t supposed to be more than 4 hours so I went to get something to eat. In solidarity with my husband and his need to fast I didn’t have breakfast and was feeling very hungry. Got to the cafeteria and even though the waiting room gave me a beeper I couldn’t relax because I couldn’t see the board. Why wouldn’t they put a board in the cafeteria ? Couldn’t take the food back to the waiting room so I ate quickly and rushed back. 

His number on the board was in a different place now and in surgery mode. So I sat and waited. I noticed there were private pods I could have reserved ahead of time and added that to my mental list of things pre op nurses should tell you. 

I couldn’t focus on anything. All I could do is watch the board. I found myself playing this game where I wanted to see if I wished hard enough and blinked that it would make the number move on to the next phase. 

All I could do is focus on that miserable number! 

Four hours went by and it hadn’t changed. That’s when the fear started to set in. I now had less information than I thought I had in the beginning, because clearly something had happened to not make his number move into the recovery phase when it was well past the time expected for his surgery. Fifteen minutes of freaking out until I realized I really needed to go to the bathroom which would require me to leave the room. 

Why did I wait so long? 

Now the Dr could call at any minute. I waited another 15 min and decided there was one thing I couldn’t wait for anymore. I let the desk know and I raced to the bathroom. Of course when I came back the nurse was waiting for me on the phone! They just wanted to let me know that the doctor was still in surgery and that everything was still going fine. 

My brain froze and I couldn’t get out the questions I had so I simply said - OK. 

So I sit and watch the numbers. I now had too much information but not anywhere near enough and those numbers just stayed there and mocked me. You now have information - surgery is not over - but I didn’t know why. So I just only had confirmation that the numbers were still right. 

I was one of the small group of people still left in the waiting room. No eye contact was made but anytime the phone at the desk rang we all jumped. Maybe all of our surgeries were running longer than they were supposed to.

People started calling and texting me to see how everything was going because they knew it should have been done and I had to tell all of them that the numbers were telling me he’s still in surgery and the nurse confirmed that that was the truth. 

So I watched the number and another hour went by. I was hungry again but didn’t dare leave the waiting room out of fear that I would miss out on talking to someone who had more information. Seven hours after his surgery started is when his number changed to recovery. If I had had the energy I would have jumped up and did a little dance. I wouldn’t have minded it because I now was the only one in the waiting room. I asked the person at the desk what usually happens next and she told me the Dr will most likely come down. So I sat and waited. 

His lonely numbers were the only one on the board and I was the only one keeping the waiting room opened it seemed.

That’s when I realized I had spent the whole day staring at a number. I think if I were to tell myself THEN anything it would have been that I needed to take my mind off of those numbers and where they were on the board. That it would have been ok to leave the room because they would have found me if there was an emergency of any kind. That stepping away was something I needed to learn how to do because my body and mind wouldn’t be able to endure at that pace and I would burn out. So if you are there and need to hear that please know the world will not fall down around you if you take a moment to step away and catch your breath.

You know what - I don’t even remember what that set of six numbers is. I spent over 7 hours watching it but as soon as I met my husband in his hospital room they didn’t matter anymore. Those number didn’t mean anything. I could have used those 7 hours recharging so I would have the energy to get through the next phase and all I did was stress about something I had no control over. 

Interesting what we spend our energy on in times of great amounts of stress.

Thank you for listening to and supporting the podcast. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it with someone who might benefit from listening to it.

I would be extremely grateful if you would consider taking a minute to leave an honest review and rating for the show in iTunes. They’re helpful when it comes to reaching other caregivers and I read each and every one of them personally!