hand of Patient lying in bed in icu room in hospital

Yesterday was a hard day.

Unfortunately, Facebook always reminds me every year in my memories when it’s the anniversary of the surgery that changed my families life.

That cold March morning, my thirty-one-year-old self walked into the hospital with my thirty-seven-year-old husband. We both expected he was going to have a quick, easy laparoscopic surgery and was going to be home in a few days to recover.

We were so wrong.

Today, I decided to take a look back at that time, and how our lives have changed since then. My memories of that time are very vivid – and very hard – so be forewarned this isn’t an easy, happy go lucky kind of article.

The person I was when I walked into that hospital seven years ago is long gone. The family that we were back then is gone too.

We had two kids back then. And we were terribly naive. Even though we never said anything like “oh, medical complications won’t happen to us” we certainly thought it. When we heard the surgeon say “the odds of a good outcome are over 99%!”, we assumed we would be in that 99%. We never thought we would be in the fraction of the 1%. He was young and had walked into the hospital a relatively healthy man.

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