La Totale

They woke me up quite early in the morning, about 06:30, to have me take my quick disinfectant shower, jump on the gurney and right up to the operation. Dr. Hagege greeted me and Dr. Hagant knocked me out.

I woke up after the operation not knowing what had hit me or how long I was out for. I couldn’t speak properly but I was immediately told that was normal. I was sweating, shivering and more than slightly nauseous. I seemed to spend a very long time in the post-op awakening room with the nurses looking over at me quite regularly. Finally I seemed to calm down and they wheeled me back to my room.

I slept for a few hours and they explained to me how to use the morphine pump. As I couldn’t speak well I couldn’t explain that I hated morphine. I still have really bad memories of the experience I had with morphine during my haemorrhoidectomy in 2001. I wasn’t willing to spend half my time throwing up to reduce the other pains. I hate throwing up. This morphine pump had a little button that I was supposed to push when I felt in pain and it would shoot morphine in to my perf and make me feel better. It remained unused…

In the evening Dr. Hagege came to see me and explained a bit about what they had done to me. Wednesday’s scanner had shown more tumours, especially one in my left tonsil, and they therefore went for “La Totale”. The endoscopy was the minimum I they were going to have to do. A tonsillectomy was a likely option and they removed both of my tonsils. Re-opening my wound and removing more tumours higher and lower in the neck was a less-likely and much more invasive option. Dr. Hagege explained that they performed an endoscopy, the tonsillectomy and the “curage ganglionnaire”. They had me open for a good 6 hours and got out all of the tumours that could be removed surgically. Because of the amount of surgery they had to perform I would be in the hospital until Monday morning. He then left me to sleep with these new thoughts…