JosephReidNZ

On this day back in 2013 was the day when I had my big spinal surgery up in Starship Children’s Hospital, Auckland, NZ.

The morning started at 5:30AM in my hospital room, lying there awake. I was told the previous day, everything would get going at around 6 in the morning. The surgeon came into my room to say that there wasn’t an empty bed in PICU (Paediatric Intensive Care Unit), but the surgeon wasn’t going to let that stop him from cutting me up like a Christmas ham (Drake & Josh reference).

The next thing to do was to clean my back from any dirt or germs, etc. Before I knew it, I was off down the corridor to the operating theater which was on another floor. So down or up I go, I wasn’t paying that much attention to what way I was going, as you can imagine, considering what I was about to endure for about eight hours or so lying face down on a hospital bed.

Eight hours elapsed and Mum received a call from the surgeon saying everything went very well. I recall her bursting into tears at the news, as you would. Mum, stepdad and Dad all came to see me in PICU at about 8PM for about 15 minutes and said goodnight to me because I had to stay in for the night, as you would imagine.

The next morning I woke up feeling like I had a hard piece of something as my back. As it was I wasn’t wrong, I did have it as my “new” back.

That was my experience of my spinal surgery.

Check out the experience on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JosephSpineOp