More details

We spent a long day at the hospital, but things went smoothly. (That's easy for me to say, since I didn't get poked with needles and get cut by people with sharp knives all day.) I think the surgeon said three lymph nodes were removed, and nothing looked out of the ordinary. There wasn't much bleeding, either. The only negative was that the surgeon had to remove a little more tissue than she thought she would. FrogRev had a nice nap when we got home, and a little while ago she described what she's feeling as "soreness" rather than "pain." Her head's "a little fuzzy," too. That will all get better. A responsible adult is supposed to stay with FrogRev for 48 hours, but I'll have to do. Now we wait for the biopsy results, which won't be in until the middle of next week, and hope that the biopsy results confirm the surgeon's optimism.

Those are the details. If you want minutiae, read further.

We got there around 7:30, and FrogRev got the electrolyte IV drip soon after. She was disappointed that she had to wear gray hospital non-slip footies over her carefully chosen socks with turtles on them. The purple-trimmed gurney she was in all day helped ease her fashion pain.

The first surgical procedure happened at around 9:30. A dental-floss thin wire was inserted to guide the surgeon during the later procedure. At 10:20, she was injected with a radioactive tracer solution containing technetium-99m. (An earlier post described this solution as a "dye," but we learned today that it's not really a dye. If it had been, there would have been a separate post describing how the technician injected the dye. It would have been titled, "He dyed for us." Now I have to work that pun into a long parenthetical statement.) A long series of photos taken by a gamma camera showed us which node is the sentinel node, and it was one near the surface and therefore easy to get to, as is the case 9 times out of 10, according to the techs.

Surgery was next, at 11:50. The surgeon spoke with me at 1:15 to let me know how things had gone, and I saw FrogRev get wheeled into the outpatient recovery area about half an hour later. She spotted me in the waiting area and waved, which I thought was a good sign. She was in quite a bit of pain. When the nurse asked her to describe the pain on a scale of 1 to 10, the reply was an emphatic, "Eight!" The Percocet arrived soon after.

FrogRev is still resting and ate a little this evening. She watched "The Daily Show," and is now laughing at something on "The Colbert Report." That can't be bad.