Teamwork

The definition of teamwork -"coordinated effort on the part of a group of persons acting together as a team in the interests of a common cause."   Synonyms are alliance, assistance, joint effort, partnership, pulling together and unity, to name a few.

I have never given much credence to the word before like I do now.   Of course in the period of time that I have worked, I have been to many a training or workshop that centered around "team building."  You go and sit through many a speaker and get up and do several exercises in the art of "team building or teamwork".  You preach it to your staff and you write about it in your newsletters.  I live it!

My husband has been through and stills lives through an ordeal. He cannot do anything normal like he has before.  Every little thing that you or I take for granted, requires assistance in one form or another.  He has very little use of his right arm, so I have become the left.  We are a partnership through thick and thin.

Case in point, he just went in for a routine procedure, a colonoscopy, that test that we as adults are supposed to have when we reach the 50 mark.  So he's a little behind (no pun intended) in that area. He is 55.  He kind of lost the last five years.  So we scheduled it.  Now, he actually had one earlier this year, which was sort of uneventful.  Except that he takes coumadin and did not go off of it the first time around.  The doctor gave him several options at the time and was confident that they probably would not find anything.  Wrong!  This is Tim, remember, nothing is ordinary.  The prep he used was not really good enough, but the doctor did find a small polyp.  So he needed to reschedule another one in six months to a year.  For the next one, Tim would have to go off his coumadin for five days prior to the procedure and do a two day prep.  (Now anyone who has had one knows just how thrilling a normal prep for this procedure is.  Imagine a two day prep!)

Tim reached the perfect mindset and decided he was ready to do this again.  Off to the doctor we went and got all our instructions, got the day scheduled and we were ready.  I bet you never thought that prepping for a colonoscopy required joint effort, teamwork!  For Tim it does, remember the definition above!  I had everything laid out on the counter for him.  I read the instructions, he read them too.  We were planned out right down to the hour, first with day one, then moving on to day two.  He was down to the drinking of all that solution.  (I put it into 6 water bottles for easy access for him to drink, as he had to start while I was at work.)  You all know what happens next, or is supposed to happen.  Well it didn't.  It didn't the first time and it didn't the second time.  For me, when I had this procedure, I was done and cleaned out in several hours.  For Tim, he started at 3:00 pm and I'm not sure how well it was working for him even by bedtime.  Oh well!

The next morning, we were up at 5:30 am getting dressed and ready to go.  Tim needed to be at the hospital by 7:30 am.  His procedure was scheduled for 8:30 am.  So off we went, piece of cake so far.  He registered, got called in, got undressed and was awaiting his turn.  The nurse got him hooked up to an IV, the anesthesiologist talked to him and lastly the doctor was ready. Off he went and off I went for a cup of coffee. (Remember an earlier post...coffee addiction!)  Very shortly later they called me in and the anesthesiologist told me that during the procedure, Tim had some breathing difficulties.  So he had ordered him an albuterol treatment.  The doctor came out and talked to us and said that Tim scared the wits out of him during the procedure.  As suspected he wasn't as clean as he should be, he also was having such a hard time breathing that they had to intubate him.  He was able to snag the polyp but really could not scope him as well as he would have liked.  The doctor wanted Tim to be watched by the nurses and continue on oxygen for a while.  We, of course, were not in any hurry. So we ended up hanging around for several more hours.  During the course of this time, Tim had a second albuterol treatment.  He was pretty raspy and coughing quite a bit.  His original recovery nurse was going to lunch, so her replacement came in, looked at Tim and deemed him OK to go home.  That is all my husband had to hear.  We pulled it together and went home.  Phew....what a day so far.   A simple procedure that for most of us is done and over in a couple of hours.  To be continued...