We normally retire relatively early. Even before Andrew’s need to hook himself up to an annoying laser printer for 8-10 hours every night, we’ve never been late night people
Probably in large part due to the fact that I am physically incapable of staying awake past about 10 p.m. unless I am forcibly prevented from assuming a sitting or lying position and closing my eyes.

The evening of the 25th of August, however, neither of us saw any use in going to bed at our regular time. We realized that neither of us was going to sleep well and since we had to be at the hospital at 5 a.m. we were planning an alarm time of 0300.
Why no, in fact, it doesn’t actually take an hour plus to get from our house to Swedish First Hill, especially not at 0400, and we were familiar with the route, but this was emphatically NOT a date that we wanted to be fashionably late for.

So that night Andrew took his prescribed full body shower with chlorhexidine body wash — and why does Hibiclens stink so badly anyway? I use multiple iterations of chlorhexidine disinfectants every day, including surgical scrub, and none of them have that artificially floral chemical smell that Hibiclens does.
Clean jammies, clean sheets.
We stayed up until a little after 11 when I, with half a Xanax on board, passed out entirely until the alarm kicked us out of bed at 3.

I fed the cat, dressed, and ate a piece of toast. Andrew took another Hibiclens shower.
Andrew collected his wheelie suitcase, I grabbed my purse and the Big Bag Of Distraction, containing two different knitting projects, my tablet, a paperback novel, coloring book and a collection of colored pencils, my iPod with multiple audiobooks, and a container full of blueberry muffin cake, and we were off.

In fact, at a little before 4 a.m. on a Monday it takes far less than an hour to get from our house to Swedish First Hill. It’s probably the one time of the day when that can honestly be said.

So at 4:17 we wandered into the lobby at Swedish, went to the registrar — what a miserable job that must be at that hour of the day — registered, and were told to report to the 11th floor.

I would like to say that they put either Andrew or Curt in room 1142, but they didn’t. Andrew was in 1145 and Curt in 1147 (although we didn’t know that at the time).
A flurry of activity including Andrew stripping, a full body chlorhexidine wipe down, IV catheters, and a number of various fluid samples.

Then.
We.
Sat.

I don’t resent the “hurry up and wait” part of that day. It was annoying, yes, to have to get up at well above the ass crack of dawn so that we could rush to the hospital only to have to sit and wait for multiple hours before they could start this whole circus. I know that behind the scenes things were happening at a remarkable, and probably quite frantic, pace.
I do resent the fact that there wasn’t any place for me to get even partially horizontal so that I could sleep some too.
Andrew nodded off for a while, easy when one is in a bed, and I napped periodically sitting in the chair.

It was probably about 7:30 before anesthesia came to get Andrew. We went downstairs in an entirely different elevator than the one we’d come upstairs in. Which, for the record, was an entirely different elevator from the one we’d come up from the parking garage in. I really wonder if there is one employee in that building who has seen every floor and can negotiate without having to stop and look at a map.

Once we were in the realm of the presurgical anesthetic suite…..we sat and waited.
Met the anesthesiologist, a dude with a most amazing mustache who was a little put off by my request to have the actual names of the drugs that he was going to be using.
Met with the surgeon.
People popping in and out of the cubicle like bloody hummingbirds then *poof* the driving team was there, they were moving Andrew along, and I found an elevator and went upstairs to wait.