Every interaction at the hospital from this point forward felt like a new episode of the Twilight Zone.
I still never understood why her surgeon approached us with such a big smile. He did tell us that surgery had gone well and she would be brought up from the recovery room soon.
He said he had removed a very large part of her small and large intestine, as well as a very small nodule. We, of course, asked if the tumor and nodule were cancer, and he, once again, said he didn't like to use that word. He did say it was possible.
We knew it was cancer, and at this point, I just wanted to shout CANCER CANCER CANCER in his face.
He explained that he had performed a right hemicolectomy and that her tumor was the size of a softball. Everything was sent to pathology, and he said we'd have the results within a week.
A WEEK?!
Everything we had read and had heard from other Stage IV colon cancer patients my mom's age were in complete opposition with the happy expression on his face. We've since determined he's just not good at delivering bad news, which isn't probably a good thing when he's a colorectal surgeon who regularly removes masses from patients' stomachs. Nevertheless, we were relieved to hear that surgery had gone well.
Mom was eventually brought to her room, and she was in an excruciating amount of pain. Remember, mom doesn't complain when she's in pain, so when she said her pain level was a 10, I knew something was wrong.
She could barely speak because she was in so much pain, and she whispered there was a problem with her urine catheter. She had had kidney stones many years ago, so she knew what a urine cath was supposed to feel like, but she said this didn't feel like that and there was something definitely wrong.
All efforts to convince a nurse something was wrong with the cath fell on deaf ears. The surgeon made the mistake of giving me his personal cell phone number, so I of course called him and said there was a problem. And there was.
I'm fairly certain the nurse saw the venom in my eyes, and I was about 20 seconds away from diving across the bed at her.
Fortunately the surgeon called over and had the urologist take a look. He immediately removed the cath, and her blood pressure went down to normal, and she said her pain was only a 6.
The rest of the night went okay for her. She couldn't eat much, but they kept her pain under control.
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