Tuesday: February 14, 2012 (Part Two).

The nurse woke me around 5:30 a.m. Within a half hour, the room was a beehive of activity as various folks prepared me for the trip to surgery. Mary Lou and Lynn, my videographer, joined the scrum. Lynn would be taking her cameras into the operating room to record the proceedings.

Yesterday, the doctors had discovered a blood clot in an artery in my left leg and decided that it need to be removed.

I signed documents acknowledging all of the attendant risks, was placed on a gurney and wheeled down various hallways and an elevator that carried me down to the surgical suite. I was struck by the long row of white medical coats hanging in one of the hallways. Even at this early hour, the place appeared busy. Mary Lou gave me a kiss and I was wheeled into the OR, a sparse room much larger than I expected.

Nurses deftly transferred me from the gurney to the narrow operating table. The anesthesiologist sitting behind injected something into my IV line while someone else hooked the prongs of an oxygen line to my nostrils.

Dr. Daniel Clair appeared at my side. I've come to think of Dr. Clair as another sign of grace. I might have a potentially fatal complication to go along with my potentially fatal disease, but I also have one of the world's top vascular surgeons working on me.

But nothing is ever easy. Dr. Clair looked down at me and gave me an unwelcome surprise.

“I'm not sure I'm going to be able to save your big toe,” he said.

That was not what I expected to hear. He explained that he would be breaking up the clot, but there were no guarantees that he could remove all of the material, which would then make a beeline for my big toe. Were the gunk it to settle there, blood flow would be restricted and the toe would become gangrenous and die.
 I reacted with clearly false bravado.

“Don't worry about it,” I said. “I need the big toe on my right foot more than the left one for my golf swing.”

I didn't have time to fret. Seconds later, someone gently placed a rubber mask over my nose and mouth and darkness fell. More than four hours later, I woke up in a small recovery room.

"Do I have all of my toes?" I asked a nurse.

"Yes," she answered, perplexed by the question.

Lynn, who videotaped the entire surgery, later provided the play-by-play. Dr. Clair and his team were chagrined to learn that I did not have a blood clot. I had two blood clots. They removed the first one in the meat of my left calf with relative ease. She said it squirted as if a small balloon had been burst.

The second clot proved far tougher to extract. She said Clair and his team took multiple X-rays of my leg and in between snaps would gather around me and employ various tools to get at the clot in my ankle. She said Dr. Clair appeared frustrated at times. He and his assistants spoke tersely in mostly one and two-word sentences. Finally, to their relief, they managed to break up and vacuum out the clot.

A two-hour procedure took twice as long as scheduled. Dr. Clair rushed out of the OR and sprinted down the hall, Lynn said. I apparently had made him late for his next appointment.

Later, when I asked how the procedure went, Dr. Clair said: “You were a tough case.”