Surgery Spring

Dear Readers,

My regular pagan holiday post comes in the form of a (late) diary. Here are the first four entries.

March 30, 2020

In what might be seen as supremely good timing, considering the pandemic lockdown, I have spent the spring equinox (March 19) and the advent of this new season recovering from spine surgery. Now at the end of March I’m still mostly lying in bed flat on my back so I am speaking into my phone to tell you the story. I’m thinking installments.

I was scheduled for the surgery on March 12 at Oakland Kaiser Hospital. The surgeon was the same one who worked on me three years ago when I had surgery on my lower spine, Timothy Huang.

Good friends know that I have been complaining about pain in my right arm for years now. According to the actuarial tables I can expect to live to be 82, twelve more years. The prospect of living with worsening pain was depressing and prompted me to seek relief. After years of pain killers (we call ibuprofen vitamin I around our house) I finally got Kaiser to give me an MRI. The expression on the doctor’s face when she saw the picture disturbed me. Even I could see that my spinal cord was being crushed by deteriorating bones in my neck. The doctor said “Don’t fall down. Trauma could result in paralysis.” I began to consider what life might be like as a quadriplegic. 

My cervical spine was a mess. Nerves were being pinched, my spinal cord was permanently damaged, vertebrae four through seven are worn down to the bone. I was told it could only get worse not better. So surgery was a no brainer. Oh I looked forward to it.

Including photos from our backyard garden, my savior during this recovery/pandemic period.

April 2, 2020

It’s April now and I’m feeling better three weeks after my surgery. I’m still spending quite a bit of time lying on my back but I’ve been getting up and around a lot more.

Here’s the next chapter of my surgery story. 

Holly and I went to a pre-op meeting with the surgeon about a week before the scheduled surgery. We drove to Oakland Kaiser looking forward to hearing what they were planning to do to me.

I was tested and found to have a good strength and reflexes. My worst symptom was the pain in my right arm and hand. We looked at the MRI together and the surgeon said “This won’t get better; it will only get worse.” He said it wasn’t the result of a particular injury, just long term wear and tear. I thought of all those hours spent working over my head looking up at light fixtures as an electrician.

We learned that spinal cord tissue is less resilient than nerve tissue. The most pressing problem was not the nerve pain in my arm but the compression of my spinal cord, even though that was not as painful. He recommended first tackling the spinal cord compression. To do that they would open the back of my neck, cut the vertebrae, crack them open and screw small plates in. That gives the spinal cord more room. He said this surgery might not feel like a big improvement. It’s more to hold the decline. The basic surgery is called laminoplasty, essentially decompression. 

To repair the nerve damage that creates pain in my arm he said they would have to go in from the front of my neck. Sometimes they do both operations all at once but they would like to do just the back, wait six months and see how much improvement there is before surgery from the front, which is much more risky. 

Why hadn’t I felt more pain in my neck I wondered. The surgeon said that because the deterioration had been gradual over time my body just got used to it. Also we know that I have a high tolerance for pain. I guess this is a good thing.

The surgery was a week away and I was glad that we’d been able to get an appointment so soon. I wanted to get it over with.

April 5, 2020

It’s been nearly four weeks since my spine surgery and I’m feeling ever so much better. I still spend many hours lying on my back listening to podcasts and novels on my phone, but I’ve been sitting up more, taking little walks and sitting in the sun in the garden. I’m not ready yet to be a planter. Holly is doing that. But I actually pulled some weeds yesterday. Like three weeds. Still it felt like one small step for woman.

Here’s chapter three of my surgery story.

Our Oakland Adventure. March 11, 2020.

We planned to drive to Oakland the day before my surgery. Holly had reserved a motel room near Kaiser hospital where she could stay while I was recovering. I would be staying in the hospital for at least a couple of nights so Holly would have a place to park and a real bed within walking distance.

We thought we would probably have to be at the hospital at 6 AM. Isn’t that always the way it goes? But we found out the day before that we wouldn’t have to arrive till noon the day of surgery so we would have 24 hours in Oakland California. Just like in one of those travel magazines. In this case we would just experience the half mile around the Kaiser hospital. I resolved to be a tourist. 

By this time the coronavirus was here in the Bay Area and we all knew it but there wasn’t a lockdown yet and, while some people were wearing masks on the street, most of us were not. We were just anxious. I had already been sheltering in place for the past month because I didn’t want to get any virus that would compromise my surgery.

We ate dinner that night at a newish Mexican place just up from Kaiser on Piedmont Avenue, the upscale walking and shopping street. We tried to social distance by sitting in the outdoor patio area. It would be my last meal in a restaurant for weeks, maybe months (maybe years?).

At the corner of Piedmont and MacArthur waiting for the light to change a young Chinese man asked us a question. We didn’t understand and so had him repeat it. 

“Are you lesbians?”

“Yes,” we said, a little surprised at the bold question.

Then he explained by telling a story about his grandmother and something about style or fashion. 

“Is your grandmother a lesbian?”

No that wasn’t it. He smiled politely. We decided his grandmother likes lesbian fashion and style. She must be about our age—old. I imagined she must be in China. He knew English but his accent was so thick we couldn’t understand. We smiled as we parted, amused at our flannel shirt fashion plate status.

Kaiser hospital sits at the confluence of Broadway, MacArthur and Piedmont streets, a dividing line between two very different neighborhoods.

I have spent a lot of time on Piedmont Avenue because I often visit my friend Pat who lives near there. But I have never spent time on the MacArthur side. Our motel on MacArthur was only half a mile west of the hospital but a world apart from Piedmont on the east side with its restaurants, shops, movie theater, and sidewalks packed with pedestrians.

Wide, commercial MacArthur had been known as a haven for hookers, and while we didn’t see a single hooker, we soon realized our hotel had been part of that scene. We could see it had undergone a recent renovation with new paint. But check-in was accomplished through a barred window. 

Our room had a new paint job and the bed was perfectly comfortable. Yet the barred windows didn’t open. And we could see that the door had suffered a break-in. The card lock was secured on the inside with electrical tape. I tried to imagine what had prompted breaking down the door. Had someone died in there?

In the morning there was no coffee in the lobby. No lobby. We hiked the half-mile to the closest coffee shop, a Starbucks in the hospital, where we watched a diverse population of hospital workers come and go, start their shifts. Oakland Kaiser seemed endlessly interesting and we would get to know some of the staff in the coming days.

April 9, 2020

I can’t believe I’m on chapter 4 and I haven’t even gotten to the surgery yet. But this is it!

Many of the nurses at Kaiser were men. And the guy who was my pre-op nurse told me he had worked as an ironworker before studying to be a nurse. He worked in San Francisco, he said, before OSHA made you tie off when you walked on those big I-beams. Yeah, I thought. Working without safety measures. It’s a dick thing. Anyway I got all excited because he was a construction worker brother. I told him I had worked construction and I told him about the new ironworker union‘s pregnancy leave policy which we tradeswomen are all very proud of. That didn’t interest him and he showed his hand when he said, “Women were given all the easy jobs.” I told the story to another construction worker friend of mine, a sprinkler fitter, and she said, “Hell there are no easy jobs in the ironworkers. They’re all hard. That’s one of the hardest trades there is.” She had worked on some construction jobs with our friend Fran Kraus, one of the first women ironworkers. Fran was assigned to place and weld steel stairs, a job that requires smarts and precise planning. Few of the men were capable and that’s why they gave the job to Fran. Maybe they thought it was easy, but it was not. And I thought of a few women ironworkers I know who worked in San Francisco. None of them would’ve wanted easy work. It was bullshit, but I think typical of the prejudicial thinking of our male coworkers. Sigh.

I’d had my hair shaved into a cool newfangled cut right before I went into surgery but it wasn’t short enough. A woman came in to cut the back of my hair even shorter and she did a pretty good job. She shaved it right across the back from ear to ear and so now I have an even cooler haircut. Then I got the blue net over my head.

The surgery room was shining bright, full of stainless steel. Five or six gowned workers, including the surgeon Tim Huang, surrounded me with smiling faces. Whenever they come in to give you medication or do anything nurses and doctors always ask you your name and your birthdate. Well I can remember that but when they wheeled me into surgery they asked me my name, my birthdate and what operation I was getting. I was flummoxed. I have not even tried to memorize the medical description of my surgery. I said “neck” and they said that was good enough. And after that I don’t remember anything more.

Here is what the written operative procedures said: Cervical laminoplasty, 3 or more levels; Cervical posterior instrumentation, 2-5 levels; Cervical far lateral discectomy or foraminotomy, 2 levels; Cervical laminectomy for decompression, 2 levels. Now why wasn’t I able to remember that?