First thing I noticed about TGH? The food court. I had been fasting for 12 hours, which meant I was 1-caffiene deprived 2-ravenous and 3-easily irritated. So it didn’t help that I was walking through this amazing food court with all the trimmings (did you know TGH has two Tim Horton’s and a Starbucks? Now you do.)

I had been up since 5:30 in order to get downtown by 7:30 and we had made good timing, which excited me because it meant I could break my fast a little earlier (can you tell I dread fasting?) TGH is a beautiful hospital to navigate compared to St. Mikes, I only had to put my glasses on once to read the signs.

First, I went upstairs to register with the pre-assessment office and grab my new schedule, then headed on down to the blood lab. The waiting room was packed! There were tons of people there and thanks to my eavesdropping skills I learned that most of these people were either pre or post-tx (tx = transplant).

Unfortunately, one woman was a little too open about her tx experience (deciding to speak at a volume that could wake the dead…which I know because it woke me up) and decided to blab about how everyone should be an organ donor and it should be an automatic process, blah blah BLAH. While I am obviously pro-organ donation (and bias because I need one in the future) I am not about shoving my opinion down peoples’ throats and this woman was making me regurgitate before 9 am. Anyway, a few of us laughed in the corner, then I got called for blood work—where they proceeded to help themselves to 11 vials of my blood like it was a vampire buffet. After blood work I was a happy camper because that meant I could indulge in the awesome food court and have my morning tea!

Next I went for chest x-rays, which are pretty routine. I ended up waiting there for quite a while because they accidentally forgot about me, which is not routine… BUT I met two brothers who had already had lung transplants. One was getting assessed for his second transplant, while the other said he was going to be assessed for his third transplant soon. The second brother had his second transplant in 1994—a time when second transplants were not common—and was only given a 5% chance of survival. Obviously, he has since beat those odds!

After x-rays I met with the dietician. At the risk of sounding negative I will just come out and say it: I wasn’t a fan. Not only did she not bother to weigh or measure me, but also she rounded my height to five feet (I am flattered, but let’s be realistic here, I’m barely 4’10) and guesstimated my BMI. Ummm sorry but that is not really professional when you are evaluating someone to see if they are a suitable candidate for the biggest surgery they can have! So I wasn’t a fan of her, especially after she said my BMI was 18 and ‘just good enough’, I know for a fact it is higher! And yes, this is a sensitive subject because I work hard to get my weight on. I may even lose sleep tonight.

Anyway, after that I only had one more test left called a V/Q perfusion scan—basically you have dye injected into your vein and you lie under a camera that traces the dye to see how the blood and airflow is distributed into your lungs. Sometimes one lung will have more blood flow than the other because it has been more damaged from infection. This will serve as a guide in the future during the tx to help decide which lung to remove first.

All in all it was a pretty good day, everything ran extremely smoothly and on-time. The hospital environment was pretty relaxed and although I am exhausted from all the waiting around, I was more than okay because my parents booked the Delta Chelsea for two nights so I would have close sleeping quarters to the hospital. Tonight we went out for my sister’s 20th birthday dinner, ate good food, drank good wine and made the best of our hospiday (I tried to figure out a clever way to put holiday and hospital together...)

One day down, three to go.