A new respect for medicine

I spent an entire day this week at the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center with a close friend who needed surgery and left the hospital with a much better appreciation of this entire Valley.

Not that I didn’t appreciate the area before, but this hospital visit served as a reminder of just why it is that I love living here.

My girlfriend needed surgery to remove a tumor in her stomach. It’s always scary to get such a diagnosis, but this was the second time in just a few years that a tumor has decided to take up residency in her tummy and the repeat appearance necessitated immediate surgery.

My friend managed to keep her sense of humor throughout the procedure, and also in a moment of weakness asked me to go to the hospital with her. She assured me it was because of my rapier wit and lovely personality, but I think it might also have been because I have an SUV she would be able to slide into after her surgery without having to stretch stitched-up stomach muscles overly much.

Either way, I was more than willing to be there for her.

When we got to the hospital and waited in the lobby, we immediately saw some friends we knew from various shows at Valley Performing Arts. My girlfriend went over to say hello, and we talked for a few minutes about the various procedures we were having done.

Then my phone started ringing.

For the next 45 minutes, my phone rang almost incessantly from people wanting to wish her good luck and to let her know they were thinking about her. I finally started stating into the phone that I was her answering service and just asked callers to hold until I could hand the phone over.

Everyone we talked to was worried about her, and I was able to coordinate almost a dozen meals to be delivered to her house this week and next while she recuperates.

Thankfully, the nurses were very friendly about my use of the cell phone in the lobby and a few of them just started laughing every time the “William Tell Overture” started emitting from my coat pocket.

When it was time for her surgery, my girlfriend and I went into the operating room. As the nurse was gently and sweetly (OK, that might be my only exaggeration) sticking a needle into a hand that thankfully was not attached to my body, she heard my name and started to tell me how much she enjoys my column.

Yep, this column that you are reading right now.

We both giggled and reminisced while my friend patiently sat there with a needle in her neglected vein and a long-suffering look on her face.

Can I just state how superb the literary tastes of the nurses at the Mat-Su Medical Center must be?

Once my friend was wheeled away happily with a nice anesthetic coursing through her body, I walked back into the lobby, stopping along the way to talk to another couple that I knew. They admitted they knew I was in the room next to them because of the laughter and groans emanating from behind the curtain, along with the thrown hospital slipper.

Apparently, I am one of a very few people that can cause an ill person to physically remove a sock and toss it at them. That makes me proud.

After her surgery, the doctor came to talk to me out in the waiting area and three more people struck up a conversation with me after he left. Apparently, he was also their surgeon, and they wanted to let me know how very much they adored him. One nice man even offered to show me his scar.

I declined, albeit reluctantly.

When I made it back to see my friend, she was quite groggy, but still mentally sound enough to refuse my requests to sing numbers from “The Wizard of Oz.” In fact, when I begged for “If I Only Had A Brain,” she only glared at me with a sleepily disgusted anesthetic look on her face, not to be confused with the groggy disgusted Percocet look she got on her face about an hour later.

She also told me that when she gave her new nurse my first name to page me from the lobby, the RN started laughing and added my last name. Turns out, this nurse is a good friend of mine from church and her teenage daughter is in the Sunday School class I teach. When I offered to tell her eager co-workers some interesting stories about this nurse from when she recently starred in a church production I directed, I was joyfully threatened from the other end of the building with what I think was a tongue depressor.

My girlfriend announced that, in the future, I should probably just be on a guest list for anyone having surgery since I apparently knew everyone anyway, or would by the time we left.

Her husband arrived shortly before the doctor signed her release forms and we drove her home and tucked her into bed. I realized that I had met, talked to and laughed with more people in one day than most people do all month.

My girlfriend, although sore, came through the surgery wonderfully and hopefully will never have another reoccurrence of her tumors. But if she needs to go back, she knows I am there for her. Well, myself and about 50 other people, only some of whom she’s never met.

And you know, this is why I love living in this Valley.

Tiffany Horvath is the mother of two and the stepmother of one. Her husband, Drew, was deployed in Iraq and returned in December. She writes every Sunday abut life at home for the wife of a deployed soldier.