A year ago today

Exactly a year ago Judith and I drove to Sacramento. It was dark when we left the house. We had to be there before eight I think. I don't remember exactly, except that we drove half way there before sunrise and stopped for coffee and egg white bites at the Starbucks in Angel's Camp. 

We had some time to wait. Most of what happened is now a bit of a blur, save three memories. The first was saying goodbye as she was taken into the operating room. She was frightened; I held her hand and told her it would be fine. l really believed that. 

I waited in the car park. The operation was scheduled for ten and was supposed to be over by noon; but by 1:30 I'd heard nothing. Then I got the call from Max Horowitz, the surgeon. The operation had run longer than expected but he thought it had been a success, at least as far excising the cancer was concerned. It had progressed to Stage 3, I think he'd said, but the margins were clean.  I was relieved that the operation was over but concerned; Stage 3 was not what I'd wanted to hear.  Now we had the chemo ahead of us, but that was a month away and I was looking forward to Judith coming home.  

The next memory was going into recovery as Judith was waking up. She was under a heating blanket, still very groggy, her hands making little grasping motions. She wanted her special hydrogen-infused water water which we'd brought from home. The nurses let me stay till 6pm when I set off home to feed the cats.

I would retrace that journey for a week. Judith was supposed to come home after three or four days but because someone had cut into a large vein during surgery (that was why the operation had run so long) and she'd not been re-positioned, she sustained serious motor nerve damage from the sustained compression. That deprived her of any motor function in her left ankle. Foot-drop was the very non-technical-sounding term for the condition. That was why she stayed in hospital several days longer than planned, and had a significant impact on her life for the next six months, confining her to her chair for most of the time. It was the first indication that things weren't going to go smoothly.

The last memory from that early hospital episode was picking her up to go home. I think she was to be discharged around noon. I went to her room, talked with one of the surgeons about her foot drop (although that may have been a different day) and then went to bring the car round. But there was some confusion and crossed wires about which entrance she'd be coming out from and it took a few phone calls to sort that out. She was pissed and I was annoyed that the episode had soured what should have been a happy occasion. As things turned out, there would be very few happy occasions after that.