Hello darkness my old friend.

So it was Friday 5th February; it was dark and horrible outside, I was up early post one alarm snooze and getting ready to shower. I had one of those Hollywood moments in the bathroom mirror where I made a great speech to me and me only. Something along the lines of you’ve got this, who cares if you’re losing a ball, it’s not like anyone would ever know. There’s no reason to be down or sad, you’re the only person who sees the balls. A silly pep talk that helped subside the butterfly’s that I had been feeling since the night before.

I was hungry and thirsty but I knew I couldn’t have anything apart from a sip of water which I later went on to repeat about ten times. I had to do a wee sample as well, so I waited until just before leaving to do, and I was praying that the one sip of water made my pee look less dehydrated, despite everything I was still worried deep down what people would think of me!

I’m sat in the car with my dressing gown and spare boxers on my lap, ready to go just sorting through all my thoughts, trying to ignore the butterfly’s.

Ellen had taken the day off as well as the weekend to help me out, and I’m so grateful for her. She holds my hand throughout the car journey and we sit and wait for my admittance time before I get out. One last kiss before the mask goes up.

I’m stood at the entrance for what seems an eternity before a nurse comes and lets me in; we go through all the standard questions...name, Date of birth, address etc etc and then fill out the Covid paperwork and I have my temperature taken, ‘Take a seat and someone will come get you and show you to your room’.

A nurse comes and grabs me 5 minutes late and shows me to my room, a standard hospital room with an en-suite toilet and a tv, luxury! She tells me my surgery isn’t until about half 11 and I’m sat there at 8.30 thinking why on earth did they want me here so early. About half an hour passes before a nurse pops their head in and says ‘has anyone spoken to you yet?’ ‘Nope’ I’d literally just been sat on the bed like an awkward teenager would be with his first crush in the room. Tense and probably a bit sweaty.

‘Right okay, well I need you to pop your gown on and then you will have a couple of visits from the different members of the team who will be doing your surgery, I’ll also be taking your blood pressure and go through questions. We are looking at 11.30 as your surgery time but this could change depending on others so we need you gowned up now just in case.’ Off she went just like that in a flash, I’m fully aware she probably has another 10/20/30 patients to see too. So I get gowned up and get comfy on the bed, and I put the tv on...cricket jeeez, I have it on but due to my nerves I’m not taking anything in and it’s just noise.

The first doctor arrives and she’s telling me she’s the one who puts me to sleep with a cocktail of different drugs, she seems fun and relates everything to alcohol, again I’m listening and taking it in but it soon gets out my head; all I need to know is that this doctor is putting me to sleep and looking after me while I sleep. We go through some questions and then off she pops.

Another hour or so passes and a lady comes to take my after surgery food order which just makes me even more hungry!

Really starting to get nervy and uneasy, im texting the lads and Ellen but none of it helps. The doctor who is doing my surgery who I met the week previous finally comes in to check in and fill out the remaining paperwork. He confirms what was found on the CT scan and makes sure I’m okay, he seems like a nice guy although he did tell me that today was supposed to be his day off, and seemed a bit arsey about that so straight away I was thinking ‘oh what a martyr’. Typically, I apologise, oh sorry you couldn’t have your day off.

The nurse then pops in to take my blood pressure and I ask a few more questions and she said I can ask the last person who visits me as they should have the answers, she tells me to get my Deep Vein Thrombosis socks on and I’m within an hour of my planned surgery time. I probably have another 2/3 wees between this nurse visit and the final nurse visiting which was about an hour and 15 minutes later.

I had one question on my mind; the thing I was really worrying about but shouldn’t as the surgery shouldn’t effect me, but should I be able to wee properly and what if there was blood in my wee? Is that normal?

The final nurse comes in and completes paperwork with me; I ask my question and he said no and explained why but said in rare occurrences there may be specks of blood but they would monitor that if that happened. Okay that didn’t make me feel better as I was still worrying about that first wee ha!

The nurse then asks if the doctor has marked me to confirm which side he is operating on, which he hasn’t and this caused a right palava!

‘I can’t take you up to surgery if you haven’t been marked, I’m not signing off the paperwork as that’s me at risk then’ I totally understood and I waited another 5/10 minutes whilst I heard this bloke shouting around for the doctor, so he could sign me off. In the end we walk up to to the surgery room to find the doctor and he draws a big line of my right arm and he’s says ‘right arm is always the right one’, he found this hilarious but I’m a stickler for sticking to schedules and it’s like 11.50 now, I just want this bloody surgery to start!

They ask me to get on the bed and get comfortable, I can’t remember what the nurse on the right of me was doing but the doctor on the left was starting to serve up my cocktail of drugs, whilst talking to me about her energy complaints (I let slip I worked for the ombudsman), I couldn’t get a word in and then she goes ‘you might start feeling a bit woozy’ and within seconds I started feeling drunk and then she put the mask on me and told me to breathe normally. Now when they say that, I panic and could feel my self not breathing normal, and I was thinking in my head you’ve got this Dan, and boom, hello darkness my old friend.