Openbah / Journal of a Marine Officer Candidate

Category: Marines

  • New tentative surgery date

    My NYC surgeon’s office called me at 6PM tonight with some pretty good news. They successfully rescheduled 3 other surgeries so that I could get operated on March 4th. Just one minor issue: the surgeon is leaving for a conference in California the day after my surgery. To be honest, it doesn’t really matter to me, but he may decide he wants to be there himself to monitor my recovery. The choice is his, and I assume he will make the decision he feels comfortable with, and that will be okay with me.

    Tomorrow morning I need to call the Marine Corps OSO and tell them I need to get a new set of travel orders. I never mind calling them, even when I know I’m being a pain in the rear. They’re always happy to help make things easier for me, no matter how much more work it means for them.

  • Surgery pushed back, again

    Got a call Friday at 4PM from the surgeon’s office in NYC. I knew immediately what they were going to tell me, I didn’t even need to hear her say it. “You’re going to want to scream,” she says. I tell her she’s probably right.

    The doctor was looking over the upcoming surgery schedules and decided he wanted more time to spend on my surgery, and was going to push me back to March 18th. I freaked: I told her that this wasn’t just a surgery date they kept changing and that it was my life they were screwing with. She said she’d do her best to push 3 other people scheduled for March 4th back, and schedule me for then.

    I’m expecting a call from her tomorrow with hopefully some better news.

    People keep saying I should screw them and have the surgery somewhere else, but it’s just not that easy. Even if I found someone else to perform the surgery, I wouldn’t get it before March 18th. I would need to get all new X-rays, MRIs, blood tests, referrals, authorizations, physicals, etc. That means more doctors visits, more traveling, more paperwork, more hours spent on the phone, and so on.

    But people don’t think of that, it’s easy for them to just say “you should have the surgery somewhere else.” They think that’ll make me happy. I think they have no idea.

  • Giving up on sleep

    A couple months ago I was feeling like crap every day and realized that I wasn’t sleeping very well. I was constantly being woken up by the pain in my hip. So I started taking 2 Percocets every night in an attempt to sleep better.

    For a while things improved and I was able to get a solid couple hours of sleep per night, up until a couple weeks ago. I guess my body has gotten used to the Percocet and doesn’t react the same way anymore. Things have gone back to how they used to be. At this point I can’t even tell the difference between when I take the drugs and when I don’t.

    So I’m giving up on trying to get a good night’s sleep.

    Someone asked me the other day how it makes me feel knowing that I may never run again. I told him I’d be okay with it. All I really care about is being pain-free the rest of my life.

  • Surgery pushed back one week

    So I just got a call from the surgeon’s office in NYC. They are pushing my surgery back a week. Apparently the surgeon called his scheduling office today and told them them to move all his appointments. That means the surgery will now be on February 26th.

    Surgery date

  • Surgery three, one month away

    In one month I will at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in NYC. I’m more excited than I am nervous.

    Two weeks ago something happened and my leg got a whole lot worse. It began hurting all the time again. I can’t go a day without taking some Motrin, and I can’t sleep much at all without taking some Percocet. I’m glad the surgery has been scheduled and that theoretically in a few months after this next surgery I could be relatively pain free.

    At the same time I’m nervous.

    Not nervous about the surgery itself, but nervous that I’ll find out in a year that the surgery didn’t work and that I’ll need to have a total hip replacement. I don’t mind surgery. I don’t mind the pain and sleepless nights that goes along with them. What I do mind is how, for those huge chunks of time, my life is at a stand-still again, and I am unable to move forward and continue living.

    But the only thing I can do now is hope. Hope that this will be the last surgery, hope that I’ll be pain-free the rest of my life, and hope that I can return to doing the things I love one day.

    Hope that I’ll be happy.