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Operation inflation

March 22nd, 2019 · Posted by Skuds in Life · No Comments · Life

Well. Had a meeting with my surgeon today. Instead of the original estimates of a 7-hour operation followed by a hospital stay of 7 to 14 days, where they might try to send me home after 5 days it now looks a bit different. Because they want to put in a tracheostomy for various reasons I am looking at a 12-hour operation followed by at least 14 mights in hospital but possibly a week longer.

Not what I would have wanted, but the alternative is dying within a year or two so I guess I’ll have to put up with it.

And again I was bombarded with risk statistics without any details of the dataset they are based on. For example, the operation has a 5% risk of mortality. That could be good or bad depending on the sample. If it is based on that doctor’s operations then it would not be o good. If it is a UK-wide figure then its better odds. If it is a global figure it could be even better odds. If the sample includes at least 5% of people about twenty years older than me and with other conditions, then its brilliant. But as with all these things there is no way of telling.

The same with the 50% chance of complications, except that is even muddier because ‘complications’ covers a range of events that go from hardly worth mentioning to life-threatening. I should have asked them to quantify the complications as a three-point estimate and do a Monte Carlo analysis 🙂

My own view is that it will probably be OK, then all I have to worry about is the common side-effect of lethargy which is expected to last six months! Probably just as well that I am standing down from the council, because realistically I wouldn’t be able to start doing anything before Autumn.

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