Susan Kasperski's fourth Kaiser Permanente nightmare

Fourth Nightmare at Kaiser Permanente
{Stick around it gets better as you go}
The Day of my Surgery
March 29, 2004

Well here I am in the hospital and another surgery, a nurse approached me and said, "I am your nurse today and I am getting you ready for surgery. I tell my nurse several times that I would like to talk to the doctor who is doing my surgery.

The nurse pointed to a doctor who was walking past my bed. That is your doctor. I said I wanted to talk to her. She never did stop to talk to me.

Well here I go into the operating room, scared and upset that the doctor wouldn't talk to me. They are rolling me into the room and the nurses telling me to help them get me onto the operating table. The nurses and myself are having a hard time putting me on the table which was too small for me. I weigh around 260 at the time or better. There was no place to put my arms or shoulders, and the side of my butt checks were hanging over the sides. (To put it bluntly.)

They asked me to put my hands under my head and they took sheets and wrapped them around me and the operating table to hold me on. So after that was done, one of the other nurses turned on the radio.

Other nurses were getting me ready and one nurse was telling the other nurses that "we have to sterilize her all over again, because we forgot to put a tent over her face and in order to do that this table has to be turned the other way." These nurses started bickering back and forth.

In the meantime, another nurse was sterilizing my groin, saying the doctor will come and give you a local so you won't feel pain. The doctor has to put two leads into your veins that go to your heart. I ask how many nurses are in here? She told me there were seven nurses. By this time doctor Uppal walked in. I noticed she wasn't wearing anything on her head like the nurses were. She walked over to where I was and I asked her are you the doctor doing my surgery and she replied "YES" in a very harsh voice. I remember wondering why, she was angry with me. She then started feeling around my groin. All of a sudden I started screaming, trying to get off the table, the pain was unbearable. The nurses were all yelling at me to stay still or I will hurt myself. Let the doctor finish putting the leads in. About that time I fell off the table and was hanging by the sheets that were around me. All of the things that had been placed on my stomach (all the tools) were on the floor and the nurses were trying to put me back on the table. All of this with out any pain killer at all. Now they decided to give me something and out I went. Thank God for small favors.

When I was coming around I saw the doctor leaving and a nurse made a remark, and said the doctor had a very hard time getting the pacemaker out. She had to use her hands to get it out. I thought to myself "Oh my God, she went from my chest down my side to below my stomach to get it."

Now for the record, the table was never turned nor was there a tent over my head. Well they took me to a room. I asked the nurse what is all this dark hair on my chest? (It looked like the short hairs that would come off a dog after you have given it a bath.) The nurse replied, "I don't know." My thought was that maybe the doctor had sweat during surgery and she shed all over me.

Come to find out she put the new pacemaker in my (Double DD Breast) near my nipple, so now when my breast moves, so does the pacemaker and I can't get a mammogram now in the left breast.

To this day I still have a lot of pain. The pacemaker bangs around in my breast and it is sore to the touch. It feels like it is making a path as it bangs around.