Scheduled Maintenance

I went through a scheduled maintenance, a.k.a surgery, at PAMF’s Mountain View Surgery Center, on December 1st, in order to remove some malware(stones and cysts) from the system(my body). I was offline(by sedation) from 8:30am to 10:30am. The maintenance went smoothly and the system is rebooting(recovering), expected to be fully functioning in a few days.

Why Maintenance

Back to September, one day I woke up with sharp and unexplained pain, I had to rush to Urgent Care(with painkiller to manage the pain). CT scan found some stones and cysts. The next month, I talked to a physician and scheduled this surgery to remove them. I need to wait a call for a few days to schedule a date, and the earliest time would be December 1st.

The Maintenance

Three days before, I had to have a Covid test regardless of being vaccinated, and stayed at home to avoid any possibility of contracting Covid. One day before, I got another call from surgery center to go through some instructions.

On the day, I took a Uber there, checked-in. I met multiple nurses and the physician. They all asked questions, let me ask questions, and explained in details about the procedure. The physician also explained some possible trade-off decisions they had to make during the procedure upfront(whether put a stent or not, they wouldn’t be able to discuss the trade-off with me when I was asleep). And a lot of paper work, and lot of double-check questions.

Then I got IV, was rolled into the operating room, moved to operating bed, was covered with kinds of monitoring tubes, then I knew nothing…Until I woke up. A nurse fed me some medicines and water, provided me some post-procedure information, let me dress up, then discharged me. They already called my wife in advance, she was already outside waiting for me.

The rebooting

It’s still ongoing, I am still recovering, with intermittent pain, sometimes incision bleeds. I am basically lying on bed doing nothing and being useless. My wife is doing all the housework and taking great care of me and kids. Surgery is not fun.

The physician gave me a follow up call in the afternoon, checked on me. The day after, another staff at the surgery center called for another followup: when we were discussing we realized we both speak Chinese so we switched.

In the coming days, I expect the stones and cysts to be analyzed, so that I can work with physician to figure out what to do for prevention. I guess it would be live healthy life which would surely mean some changes to my daily routine. After all, we are our own P0, we should prioritize healthy.