Gigantic Cyst- Kate Goes To Australia For Surgery
Trip Start
Sep 29, 2007
1
108
221
Trip End
Ongoing
Brisbane,
Australia
Saturday, April 26, 2008
I dragged my luggage and two Dali-esque artworks through all the airports and felt like i was protecting a baby in my ovary, not a cyst. I had to be very careful. The cyst had gotten bigger on the flights. Once i got to Brisbane, i was exhausted and had to spend two hours getting fully searched by Australian customs officers since i had been through so many South American countries and of course i had cocaine stashed into every orifice. They took my pigskin wrapped matrimonial llama statute and also Nadineīs Peruvian pipe that had beautiful eagle feathers attached to it
Gold Coast Hospital
. I paid to have them sprayed and returned within six weeks. Because i didnīt have an address in Australia, the customs guy had to escort me out to mum who would have got a shock and thought i had pulled a Shapelle Corby on her.Luckily mum was there to pick me up and we went straight to the Gold Coast Hospital where we waited in the Emergency room for four hours while i faked serious pain. I was eventually seen to by a friendly doctor who scheduled me in for tests with Dr Henalla, the best doctor in the field for a time during the week
I go home to mums and sleep then get to see the kids and Alison the next day. I am still exhausted though and loving mumīs cooking after the South American food. I research on the internet about this surgery and the recovery time involved so i can do the best i can to recover quickly and get back to my Nadia.
I see Dr Henalla who confirms that i need surgery and then pull off an award winning performance in order for him to bring forward the next available operating date. As i suspected, it is not cancerous. Originally he had given me June 23 which was two months away, add on the recovery time and i would be a very long time in Australia with not much to do
in transit
. So, i managed to negotiate with him to get the date brought forward to Friday, three days away. I am a little scared of the thought of the cutting of the muscle and skin and tissue and all to do the open surgery but stay calm. I see another nurse for a pre-operation interview where i sign all the paperwork and they forge the doctorīs signature because he is not available to discuss the surgery details with me. This was the only way i could get the surgery at such short notice. They give me some sponges for cleaning and tell me what happens with the anetheatist.The Friday surgery is straight forward, i wear a hospital gown, paper underwear and long compression socks, a gown and a robe and sit in a waiting room with mum reading magazines from 1994. I deliberately leave her outside the room when i see the nurses because i didnīt want her to worry if she hears what they were going to do during surgery. Dr Henalla tells me that the cyst is indeed gigantic and that it is taking up my whole left side ovary. He informs me that he would have to take my whole ovary and fallopian tube from the left side and i am devastated at this news but still relaxed. The doctors in Peru were correct, i still have a healthy one left. I am wheeled into theatre on a bed and then am out for an hour and a half.
I awake in a recovery section of the hospital with two nurses gossiping at the end of my bed with wheels
Los Angeles To Brisbane
. I canīt talk but I want to talk to them and ask them how my surgery went, you just donīt know what has happened at that point and you feel like you have been in car wreck. When i do speak I ask them something about the lights being switched on in the temple, an Ayahuasca ceremony flashback. I am wheeled in to a hospital room where there are five older ladies already inhabiting the other beds. Mum comes into the room and i start to really wake up. I had been too scared to look at the knife cut wounds on the bottom of my abdomen, they felt large but were in fact not as big as i thought. There was a catheta attached to me and a feral drainage tube going into a hole in my abdomen and leading under my bed. I had a morphine drip, oxygen mask and painkillers and the nurses would check my blood pressure constantly. I was sad when i told mum they had taken my ovary and she was astonished to find they had drained five litres of fluid from the cysyt before removing it. I was absolutely astonished to look down and see a flatter than flat stomach, i was very skinny without the bump. I hated hospital and never want to return for any reason.Recovery began and i had my crystals and kittle Ganesh shrine with me plus mono loco was in bed with me too. I would meditate and place the crystals on my body to help the healing. I was willing to get better any way i could so i could get the hell out of there. The first morning i awoke and was made to get out of bed and shower before mum arrived for the day. The nurse had to help me out of bed because it was excruciating pain to get up and stretch out my abdomen. Then she had to help shower me. My hospital bed was the old have to be hand- cranked- by- a-rude- nurse type and it annoyed me becuase they would leave me in uncomfortable bed positions and i couldnīt move to change it. Mum came everyday after this and helped me shower and sat and watched bad daytime television with me
Qantas sunrise
. Jackson and Alison came to visit too and i think Jacko thought the pirate scar was very cool. I wasnīt allowed to eat any solid food and very little of anything else. I was very hungry. Eventually the tubes were taken out, i started eating double of everything they offered me and the drip was taken away and i was getting ready to go. The old ladies in the ward were very depressing. I was surprised to find that under the bandages was a smaller cut than it originally looked . I was in for five days altogether and then Don drove me home where i lay down for a few days in pain. I stocked up on Panadeine Forte the strongest pain killers prescriptions and knew i was going to survive.The rest of my recovery was supposed to take 6-8 weeks but i ended up recovering in 4 weeks and had already booked my flight back to Ecuador in South America to continue on our journey. Nice one. I attribute this speedy recovery to my mental state of mind which was particularly strong and positive for the duration of the recovery. The bonus of the recovery was that i had the pleasure of spending some quality time with mum and would have done it all again just to experience that time spent with her. Nadine sent me a giant bunch of flowers through interflora and they really cheered me up. There were birds of paradise and lillies. B and Margs sent me a little plant in a can that grew and sprouted a message the day before i left to return to South America. The message was get well and i intended to.
Most of the time was spent down at Fingal Heads on the Northern New South Wales coastline where Mum and Don have a caravan on the ocean. The area is completely quiet during the week and very beautiful, a perfect place to recover from surgery. I had quit smoking and went down to a mainly fresh, chicken and fish food diet in order to take in as much nutrients and vitamins as possible
Nadine's flowers arrive
. This included goji berries, Brazilian nuts, walnuts, nalmonds, a variety of seeds, lecithin, linseed, soy, pepitas, sunflowers seeds, sultanas, malamuca honey, acidophilus yoghurt, inner health plus capsules, sushi, herbal and green teas, garlic cloves, ginger, olive leaf tea, vitamins of all kinds, yakult drinks, fruits and salads with sprouts. The salad was a luxury coming from Peru. I also found a new attraction to dark chocolate with fruits of the forest berries scattered throughout it and mum would bring me goodies everyday. I read spiritual books and meditated alot. I used propalis for healing and also a natural scarless healer cream. I used Rawleighs salve on the wounds and they started to heal rapidly. Rawleighs is an old remedy that mum has always used. It is a light amber coloured antiseptic salve that has the consistency of thick tree sap and comes in a tin. i watched some Oprah and had lots of quiet time. I ate alot of food and made a point of feeling the vitality of life flowing through my body, loads of energy work. Later on i would enjoy Allens lollies and strawberry Freddo frogs, Australiaīs best selection. State Of Origin was played (Queensland lost), Wet n Wild has a new waterslide, the 50th Big Brother series was on, an earthquake happened in China, a cyclone hit Burma, a bus crashed in Peru and a volcano erupted in Chile. I went to the dentist. I spent some time with the kids and in particular Izabella. I deliberately didnīt see any friends because i was focused on recovery and getting back to the journey where my path is. I did lots of research for the next part of our journey and booked some Ayahuasca medicine ceremonies with a journalist from the US named Peter Gorman. I also booked us in to the 4th Annual Amazonian Shamanism Conference. I was feeling really good so booked my flight from Brisbane to Sydney via New Zealand and Santiago to Ecuador through the Flight Centre and stocked up on surprises for Nadine, a tent and some other hard to find travel essentials. Mum took me to the Brisbane airport where we said a teary good bye. I extremely grateful for everything mum and Don have done in helping me through recovery. Whatever it was that i was doing to cause a cyst that big to grow, i am not doing anymore. Hurray!!!
Oh, and i got a new tattoo done by a fabulous artist in Palm Beach on the Gold Coast. It is a jaguar skin print on my shoulder, nice work.
I was back on the road and in the game.
