Blood Drained... x_____x !

x_________x !!

Today I went to the hospital again, both to the Toronto General Hospital and Toronto Western Hospital. There were two planned events for today at the hospitals, pre-admission and blood donation.


The first appointment I had was a pre-admission into the hospital.

It was basically a full course on whats going to happen to me between now and 3 months later when I have fully recovered. I also got to meet with pretty much everyone who will be working on my case. I had no idea there were so many different positions in the hospital. O_O

The pre-admission contained the following things:
1. Meeting with:
- Pharmacist to go over my current medications
- Cardiac Technologist to extract blood (2 vials... ouch!) and perform electrocardiogram along with personal information entry into computer database
- Preadmission Nurse to enter more personal information into computer database and to explain the basics of what to do before and after the surgery
- Advanced Practice Nurse and/or Doctor to ask more about medications and my medical history along with a physical examination
- Anaesthetist to go through the procedure of "putting me to sleep" during the operation and medication (pain killers) for post-surgery
- Volunteer (Person who has gone through a similar surgery as mine) to go over any other questions I may have regarding the operation (ie. Recovery time, Yearly checkup, etc)

2. Going to a lecture about what to do on the day before the surgery and what needs to be done after. For example, after the surgery, I will need to use a contraption which requires me to perform a "sucking" gesture with my mouse. The practice is to help me lungs recover faster since during the operation, most of my organs will be "offline". As I will be fed oxygen and an external pump to circulate blood as my heart gets worked on. Therefore, I had to do some exercise for my organs so they will recover quicker.

3. Watching a video which briefly covers all the things I've done at pre-admission.

After the pre-admission, I had a blood donation done for the surgery incase a blood transfusion is needed.

"It is better to use your own blood since there won't be any compatibility problems nor any risks of getting HIV, AID, etc."

The blood donation took around an hour and a half due to waiting time and setup time for the blood donation. The time that they were actually extracting my blood only took about 4-8 minutes. I was pretty surprised I didn't feel dizzy or anything after the donation. My arm was very sore though. Couldn't move it for 30 minutes.

Total, I got 3 holes in total from taking blood, 2 small holes on my right armor for blood tests and 1 LARGE hole from the blood donation. Owww it hurts ;_;!

But...
Bless the doctors and nurses who worked on me today. I think they all did a good job.

I will continue to post the status of this operation in the blog if anyone wishes to read.
But as of now, the dates are as follows

CAT scan + 2nd blood donation = June 8, 09
Surgery = June 19, 09

Not much details are revealed yet.