Thankfully, with such an early appointment we were seen almost straight away. I've since found out that pre op isn't actually done in a lot of hospitals around the country, so I'll try to explain the steps in a bit more detail for those that aren't familiar. The specialists that you meet at pre op aren't necessarily the ones that will be present during the procedure, but it is their job to make sure that everyone is right before the surgery goes ahead.
The first person we saw was a surgical nurse. Her job is to check all of Ellie's vitals - temperature, blood pressure, etc - and ask the boring "are there any allergies" type questions. I explained to her that Ellie had been coughing and had had a few high temperatures lately, but because her te erasure was only 36.2 degrees she sent s through to the next step.
From there we were sent through to another room to meet with an anaesthetist. He asked all the same questions as the nurse, and was starting to bug me when he kept reading Ellie's notes wrong and asking really dumb questions like "she was quite anaemic when she was born, wasn't she?" I kept looking over at Drew and biting my tongue so that I didn't snap.
When I mentioned to him that Ellie had been coughing he took a listen to her lungs and discovered that she was actually very rattlely and congested. From here on he was brilliant, and I soon forgot about being annoyed with him. I'm glad I kept my thoughts to myself in the end. Sometimes you just need to keep quiet I guess.
He immediately cancelled Ellie's operation. He said there was no way that they could operate with her lungs sounding so congested, particularly because her airway will already be compromised by the procedure. We knew that this was going to happen, but he was very apologetic anyway. He seemed to think there had to be a better way than having families travel to Hobart, miss work, pay for accommodation, all to be sent home.
We were told that we would need to take Ellie to our GP once her cough stopped and get her cleared to go back on the surgical list. Once she's clear we need to call the nursing liaison who will organise a new date, probably in three or four weeks time.
It was decided that although the operation wasn't going ahead, we should still finish the pre-op appointment so that when we came back we would just go straight to the hospital and skip this step. So after the anaesthetist made a few more notes, we went back to the waiting room to wait for the plastics consultant.
Doctor Kimble is way to busy to run these clinics, so instead we see an intern for the pre-op consult. All they really need to do though is check Ellie's history, ask all the same questions, and sign off on the operation. So it doesn't really matter who you see. Frank has a chat with us on the day of he operation anyway.
The young doctor who took us in for this one didn't really understand why she needed to see us. Neither did we really! She gave us a pathology form to get Ellie's mouth swabs done back home before we come back down, and explained that they would do blood tests once she was in theatre. After that we were good to go.
We were finished at around 11am, so we decided that rather than wasting another day and more money on accommodation, we would just go home that afternoon. We took Sophie to McDonald's for lunch and a quick play on the equipment, and then we started the four-hour drive home.
It's frustrating that we wasted our time, but in the end Ellie's safety comes first. She is number one in this whole debacle, and it doesn't matter if we make 100 wasted trips, as long as she comes out of that operation safely in the end.
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