Syringes of Goop and Lost Specimens and Suprise Surgeries, Oh My!

Lots has changed since my last post. Yes, in the last 24 hours. First of all, no sooner than I posted about "Amphoterrible" they took me off of it and the other antifungal and put me on two others that are a touch easier on ye olde kidneys. The only real downside is that I misunderstood when told that one was "oral." I assumed it was a pill, it is in fact a little syringe of white goo that I have to squirt in the back of my mouth. I am in the camp of people who would rather swallow a pill the size of my fist than drink or swallow anything, but now that I've gotten used to it (and chasing it with ice cream/milkshakes) it's really not so bad. The crazy part is that since my last post, I have also had surgery (!).

During my last surgery, they took biopsies of the mucocele and sinus tissue to send to both microbiology, to study the organisms that were/are growing in my sinuses, and pathology, to study the actual sinus tissue for abnormalities/growth etc. What antifungal medicines I was to stay on, and if I needed to be on any in the first place, all depended upon what grew out in the micro and pathology labs. For some reason, everyone was having a hard time tracking down the pathology results, which shouldn't take as long as micro, but they may just be swamped, etc etc...

Around 7:30 last night, Dr. Cannon (one of the Dr.'s on my ENT team who has so gone above and beyond her job description in treating me and whom I will remember and appreciate for a very long time) came in with an odd look on her face. She had been given the glorious task of informing me that the individual whose responsibility it was to make sure said biopsied tissue made it from my nose to the pathology lab had failed to do so. The reason no one could track down my pathology report is that the.tissue.never.made.it.there. So I had a choice to make; either make all decisions based on the fact that nothing had grown out in micro (despite the fact that the particular fungi they are worried about are known as "fastidious"; ie, need very specific conditions to grow out and can take a while to do so, rendering false negatives in short-term reports) or...go back in for a second biopsy.

Scared, but not stupid, I decide on option B, comforted by the fact that both my ENT team and CF team were also PISSED.OFF. Dr. Senior (head of my ENT team and surgeon on my case, who is also awesome) was so mad, in fact, that he had Dr. Cannon insist to the OR that my surgery be scheduled first thing in the morning, quote, "since we wouldn't even have to be doing this procedure if your department hadn't screwed up in the first place." I was immediately put on NPO and told they would come between 5 and 6 this morning. Around 4:15, the NA came in to let me know I had about 15 minutes before they'd be there, and I had just enough time to take out my contacts and change into an OR gown before they showed up to whisk me away. Thankfully, the procedure was very quick - prep and recovery each took longer than the procedure itself - and I had the smoothest recovery ever; no nausea coming to, no nothing; it was like waking up from a nap with a bit of a sore throat, just from the intubation. The rest of the day was simply in and out of sleep, eating milkshakes and ice cream when awake, with a side of dilaudid for my face and throat every now and then. If I had to have surgery for a hospital screw-up, it couldn't have gone any smoother. It's just been a crazy 24 hours!