Day 3 Surgery Day

Well this was the big day, what the whole trip had been about. Surgery. Schedule started early that day, 6 A.M. I was not allowed eat/drink anything after midnight & I was up until about then anyway. I mean, what did it matter? I was getting up to go to sleep on a table. I think I finally fell asleep around 12:45am.
We walked over (the more walking the better), & actually got there too early, it was around 5:40. There were four of us having some form of cervical or lumbar (or both) procedure done in that time slot. It's like this five days a week, almost all day. Once the ball got rolling, I was third. Typical pre-operative process... It was ice cold in there too (reduces risk of bacteria/infection) & I loved it. There were two nurses that asked a series of questions, then the anesthesiologist came and asked his group of questions (some were redundant to the nurses). This surgery is performed with local anesthesia, not being completely "knocked" out. He explained what all he would be doing. The surgeon came by and spoke to me for a bit as well. After a few more formalities (I don't remember much because I was nervous, I imagine).
Next I was taken to the O.R. I was asked to climb onto the table, and the next thing I remember after doing that was being woke up. I remember feeling like, "When are they going to start?" They were talking reassuringly and waking me up. I was really out of it, but in contrast to my previous surgery, much better than being "knocked" out.
The people in the room lifted me over to a stretcher, and I was pushed into the recovery room. I was placed by a window on the 4th floor, during and after I left my "flight to Hawaii" courtesy of the anesthesiologist. The nurse was telling me about what procedures the surgeon was able to perform, everything was a success. Recovery time was about an hour, seemed like about 10 minutes.
I like the way my wife put it; she was called up to what she thought was recovery, and only minutes after she arrived upstairs, I came walking around the corner talking and laughing with the nurse. She was shocked! She just knew I would be "out" for a long time. No matter what they had told us it was still hard to fathom how quick and simple the surgery went. Of course you have to consider that we had been through this before and that was a bad experience compared to how wonderful this was going. I sat in the discharge area for about 30 minutes. The surgeon came by and explained the results. I laughed and told him the pictures looked like a smashed up cherry pie, but if he tells me what they are supposed to be, I would accept his explanation.
Just after that, we left LSI for the day. We took the shuttle back to the hotel. The driver asked if could take us back the door of our suite, but I decided to walk back from the clubhouse. Probably not all that big a task, aside for the fact that I had just had:
1 herniation completely corrected... he said it was twice as large in person than the MRI showed.
This was facing inward, directly on the base of the spinal column He cut away a small piece of bone, removed the bad part of the disc, and used the heat from the laser to toughen the outer part of the disc. There is more that was done but it was pretty technical.
2 bulges on 1 disc reversed... both at L4/L5 heat from the laser reduced the size and hardened the disc again to be stronger.
2 foraminal canals opened... this space is the horizontal holes at the back of your spine. Mine had started to close off from disc degeneration. The surgeon opened that area with a small tool and laser.
arthritis "zapped" off the general area with the laser.
...he did something else with the nerve, where it had adhered to the bone.
We walked back to the room, only about 500'. I took a nap and about 3 hours later got up and walked around again. I really didn't hurt at all. I chalked that up to being put on so much for surgery. The night went on and on. By 12:30am I realized I was having trouble sleeping just like they said I might, from the meds. Oh, well. I just watched TV half the night.
All in all the surgery was 100% successful, and 10,000 times better than any other option I had to get remotely close to the results I was looking to achieve.