The Big Day

I woke up at 5am this morning for a 6am call time for a 7:30am surgery. I left my shorts on at my parents house, so we had to swing by my apartment to pick some up. Even with the side trip, we arrived around 6:10am. I had to fill out about 10 sheets of paperwork and then I sat around waiting for what seemed like an eternity. Around 7:15 they called me back for pre-op preparations. Apparently 3 other surgeries that morning required a nerve block (as opposed to general anesthesia, which I was getting), so they were running behind schedule. Dr. Griffin stopped by and asked what was taking so long, and the nurse explained the situation. At that point I have one nurse shaving my leg, one giving me the IV and one asking me about allergies and medications. In a few short minutes I was ready to go back to the OR. Apparently there was some sort of miscomunication, as no one told me to bring my knee brace with me on the day of surgery. So, I had to send my dad back to the house to get it out of my car. Ooops.
They wheeled me into the operating room and transferred me from the gurney to the table. They were trying to get my leg into the correct position for the procedure, which is the last thing I remember.

When I woke up in the recovery room, I was a little confused but I quickly regained my bearings and one of the nurses noticed I was awake. She asked if I wanted something to drink and I remember thinking I wanted some water, but she said they had coke, diet coke or sprite and I couldn't think of the word for water, so I just asked for a coke. A few minutes later, Dr. Griffin stopped by with some pictures from the surgery. She told me everything went well and while she was in there she noticed my meniscus was rough, so she trimmed that up as well. I tried to make sense of the pictures, but listening to what she was saying and trying to decipher the pictures were too much for my post-anesthesia haze. I stayed in the recovery room for a while longer. I don't really have any idea how long, as I was pretty geeked up on morphine. I remember them taking my blood pressure and removing my EKG leads and filling out some paper work, so it had to have been 10-15 minutes. The nurse said my parents were pulling the car around, so I plopped into a wheel chair and she pushed me out to the loading dock.