Monday's Plan

Monday begins with Mary's 6:30AM check in at the surgery unit of Stanford. (As an aside, our friend Mary R complained she had to check in at 5:30AM for her surgeries last year. Wants to know how we got the luxury of sleeping in!)

At 8:30AM, the procedure is to begin. Expected to take 6 to 8 hours.

Between 14:30 and 16:30 surgery should be done and the doctor will come out to talk to me. How certain am I that he will come out to talk to me? 100%. When will he be there? Whenever he can. Frankly, I think they give us time predictions as a stress test because their ability to predict precisely is nana, zero, zip.

This puts Mary in Intensive Care as early as 15:30 and as late as 18:30. No way to know at this point. ICU at Stanford allows a 30 min visit every two hours starting at 10AM and ending with the 8PM (20:00) visit.

Friends are asking if they can stop by on Monday. My answer is sure, please do if it isn't too much trouble and you don't have a cold or flu bug. I will be at the surgical waiting area located at E2 (E section, 2nd floor) all day. My experience (Mary's gall bladder, three surgeries with our friend MaryR last year) tells me to stay in the waiting area until I meet with the doctor--and he will arrive unannounced at any time. For our friend MaryR, the two primary surgeons came to talk to me while Mary was still on the table and "just a little clean up and closure" to be done. It was several hours before they moved her to recovery.

Ingrid and Maurice are borrowing Mary's kitchen tonight to make dinner for Mary, MaryR and me. Tomorrow at noon, Tim and Lara arrive for an overnight stay. After they leave on Sunday, Mary said she'd like to go to Santa Cruz for dinner on the wharf. Sounds fitting to me.

Next posting will probably be Monday morning unless someone asks a question where all of you should hear the answer. Otherwise, I won't publish again over the weekend.