Meeting the Professor
After completing six sessions of chemotherapy, I’m now going to have an operation.
In preparation for this momentous event – I’ve never had an operation before –Rob and I went to meet with the professor who is going to carry out the operation. At the meeting were the professor, two members of his team and two trainee doctors.
He gave it to us straight: I was going to have major surgery which involved a complete hysterectomy, plus removal of the appendix, and part of the olmentum, which is adipose tissue that surrounds the stomach, and that there were a number of risks involved, including blood clots, a heart attack as well as being left with a stoma, either temporarily or permanently. He explained that although the scans showed a great deal, he would not know exactly what he faced until he opened me up!
Having explained all this, leaving us both shell-shocked, he then went on to do a vaginal examination using ultrasound. He closed the curtains around the bed I was lying on, at which point I said that I had no objection to his trainees looking on. I told him that I wasn’t shy anymore given the number of doctors who had explored my nether regions in recent weeks and I invited them to watch.
Strangely, the professor seemed quite surprised by this and told me that I was ‘kind’. I joked that the good news was that the experience would probably put the young doctors off casual sex forever. He remarked that the fact that I was sanguine would help me get through this major operation.
Rob and I left the professor’s consulting rooms in a state of shock. We cried a lot. By chance, my very supportive cancer-specialist nurse phoned me as we were driving home and I told her how terrified we both were. Of course, we understood that the professor had to be totally honest with us and cover all the possibilities, even the worse-case scenarios, but it was still an extremely distressing conversation.
My oncologist also phoned to check on me because she knew from the nurse that we were very upset. She reiterated that a surgeon has to be completely up front about all the risks.
Happy pills, here we come….
