It Might Get Messy

The funniest single moment in cinema is when the shit actually hits the fan in “Airplane”. The shit is going to hit my fan on Monday, 0530 hrs. I’m sure it’ll have its funny moments. Mostly it’s going to be painful and uncomfortable. 

And when I say “painful and uncomfortable”, I mean something along the lines of horrific. I’m not clear on the details, but here’s what I do know. They have the operating room reserved for the day—12 hours. There are two distinct phases of the surgery—removing the tumor, and replacing the crater where the tumor was. 

Phase 1 starts, I believe, with them punching a hole into the front of my trachea and then sealing it from my oral cavity so I’ll be able to breathe while they deconstruct and then reconstruct my throat. One of the decisions they’ll make at that point is whether they need to simply remove my entire trachea and, in another more drastic (and hopefully remote) scenario, my voice box. Hopefully we can put that one off until I’m cogent and relatively free of the morphine derivatives. But it may not be possible. There’s at least a chance I’m gonna wake up without a trachea, or worse.

THAT would piss me off. But I think my physicians are aware of the fact that I would FREAK OUT if they hacked out my trachea without a good reason. So I presume they’ll have a good reason, should they have to go there. We may have to make that decision later, but at least I’ll be able to participate then. We will also decide if my throat is sufficiently functional to remove the tracheotomy, or if I have to live with THAT for the rest of my life. Oy.

Now, where were we? Oh yeah. Procedure. First, Dr. H opens my throat and cuts out the tumor. There is apparently a good deal of art involved in this. He says he feels the tumor, decides how big it is and how big it might get, then overcuts the trench in the back of tongue so there’s limited chance of leaving any malignant tissue. This is largely because we’re out of treatment options—I’m past my lifetime dose of radiation, so the next step up would be to excise my entire tongue top to bottom and any other tissues it might have spread to. We’re trying to avoid that at the moment. Unfortunately, the massive trough this is going to leave in my throat is going to destroy what’s left of my ability to eat solid(ish) food, drink without drowning, and not suffocate in my own saliva when I’m asleep. Ouch, if I may say so.

Now, at this point Dr. G takes over. He is a plastic surgeon, and his part in this physiological play is, believe it or not, almost entirely improvisational. Apparently, he looks at what Dr. H has done, and then decides whether it’s best to a) strip off a long strip of skin from my forearm with associated blood vessels, fold said skin into a shape approximating the chasm in my tongue, and painstakingly hooking up as many blood vessels from my arm to the ones now exposed in my tongue as he can, b) strip off a thicker and smaller chunk of skin and underlying muscle, fold it into said shape, and stuff it into the hole in my tongue, or c) scrape a big handful of functional epi- and sub-dermal material from the skin of my arms and paste this…uh…paste into the trough in my tongue. I asked him to work on my right arm. My left will have to handle my pitiful abilities to play guitar instrumentals, since singing, even singing painfully out of key as I generally do, is no longer going to be an option. 

Meanwhile, I will be deep in the throes of morphine-induced unconsciousness, catheterized, and just sort of awaiting the moment the docs finish up, the nurses get me into ICU or recovery, depending on how massive the post-surgical trauma is, and I wake up more or less in serious discomfort and pain.

At that point, if there were justice, irony and humor in the universe, “Airplane” would just be coming on the TV suspended over my bed. And I’d probably rip out several rows of stitches laughing. And it would be worth it!