And I’m not. Except in an SEO-building post title, because I’m a traffic whore.

So things yesterday could have gone better, but I don’t fault Suzy’s doctor for the things that went wrong. The plan was to perform a laproscopic hysterectomy, which would reduce her recovery time and leave her with only two small incisions on her abdomen, one in her bellybutton and one on her side. The ovaries would be left in place unless there appeared to be something wrong with them once the docs were able to make the judgement on site, as it were.

Well, the best laid plans and all that. Once the surgery began, the docs realized that due to the healing from a myomectomy Suzy had six years ago when she had several uterine fibroids removed (the largest was a benign tumor the size of a baseball) there were adhesions going on inside her abdominal cavity. Basically what happened (or at least as it was explained to me) was that as scar tissue formed from the myomectomy, the bowel, bladder and other things kinda stuck to the uterus with the tendrils of scar tissue. That made is very crowded in there, and in the process of trying to remove these adhesions, the surgeon cut Suzy’s bladder.

On the one hand, that’s a bad thing. On the other hand, if you are given a choice between having your bladder cut during surgery and your bowel, you’re going to take the bladder 100 times out of 100. So when that happened, the docs went ahead and opened her up to fix the bladder and finish the surgery. The decision was made at that time to remove her ovaries as well as her uterus to prevent the potential for ovarian cancer, because if they had to go back in later the risks would be pretty dramatic. So they removed her uterus, ovaries and cervix, fixed her bladder and sewed her back up. This added an hour to her recovery, and will lead to a recovery time of more than a month, with Suzy having to tote around a catheter bag for the next couple of weeks.

Now in our litigious society, one of the first questions that comes to mind is “can I sue anyone over this?” I don’t feel like there’s a real “yes” anywhere. Of course I could sue, but I don’t think there’s much point. Medical malpractice isn’t the same thing as an accident. If I’d smelled whiskey on the doc when he came out to tell me about the bladder problem, I’d have a lawyer already. But I didn’t. I honestly believe that this guy became a doctor to make people feel better, and to help improve and lengthen their lives. I honestly believe that he made a mistake in his procedure, just like people screw up at work every day, and the mistake was in not immediately reverting to an open incision when he saw the adhesions he had to deal with. But he made that mistake with my wife’s best interests at heart, and in the interests of shortening her recovery time and causing her less pain. And I can tell by the look on his face today when he saw her up and moving around and already on solid foods, that he feels like he dodged a bullet with this one, and that she is really healing much faster than he expected.

So while I’m probably not going to go out of the way to recommend him as Surgeon of the Year, I’m also not going to pillory the man, either. He’s got a motherfucker of a job, and I don’t begrudge him that one. But at the end of the day, Suzy’s going to be fine. She’ll be here in Presbyterian Hospital, room 767 until Friday, and then we’ll take her home where she’ll be on bed rest for another week before she’s back to doing much, but after that it will be life pretty much as usual. So that’s where we are, and where I am, and why I’m there. So thanks for all the Facebook messages, and tweets and emails and texts, I really appreciate it.

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