Mak­ing lots of new friends in the hos­pi­tal was kind of a good expe­ri­ence, and one of my sis­ters, who lived in Mon­treal, would come and visit me often. My mom came from British Colum­bia to be with  me, but the rest of my fam­ily and friends were in British Colum­bia, the other side of Canada.  After spend­ing Christ­mas in the Mt. Sinai hos­pi­tal in Toronto, I decided that, since this may be a long haul, I wanted to trans­fer closer to home, to a hos­pi­tal in Vic­to­ria, BC where I would be able to have fam­ily and friends visit.

My mother and I flew out of Toronto, and, because I was in a wheel­chair and didn’t look too well, the pilot was very good to me–he took me up into the cock­pit for quite a while. It was a beau­ti­ful, sunny day and I got to look down on a lot of prairie farms.

So I went from a whole wing of peo­ple like me to the Royal Jubilee Hos­pi­tal in Vic­to­ria with only one other patient like me. Missed the peo­ple at Mt. Sinai but at least in Vic­to­ria the beds were rotat­ing and not so depress­ing. Plus, I liked the older doc­tors in Vic­to­ria; they had been around for a while and came with a bed­side manner–a refresh­ing change from the doc­tors in train­ing in TO; they would come in, in stu­dent packs of 5–6 stu­dents, pok­ing and prod­ding me.

My new doc­tor had a dif­fer­ent approach; he low­ered all my steroid doses which made me feel the pain I was going through. That made it eas­ier to con­sent to surgery. The down­side was that now, because of all the pain, I started pain med­ica­tion and started to like it.

The night before my surgery the nurse came in to help me decide where to have my stoma placed. Place my stoma. How crazy was that! We were to pick the spot on my stom­ach which I would be using to go to the bath­room for the rest of my life. Even though this was one of the scari­est and upset­ting deci­sions, I was at least aware of what was to come. I have since learned that many are admit­ted to hos­pi­tal only to awake in the morn­ing with a bag on them. No prepa­ra­tion or deci­sion at all.

I was given some­thing to help me sleep as I had a big day ahead of me.

Sheri