Well I had my pre-op work-up at Cedars-Sinai yesterday after more then THREE HOURS to drive the 48 miles from Irvine to North Hollywood (where Cedars' is located). It was a combination of Monday morning traffic, heavy rain and street flooding, highway construction and if that wasn't enough to mess things up, when we finally got to within about 3 miles of the hospital someone calls-in a bomb-threat to a high-raise building two blocks from our final destination. Needless to say, it was a mess with the police closing streets and trying to move emergency vehicles around. We finally managed to weave our way around the confusion but we were still nearly 30 minutes late for our 9:30am appointment, but they took us anyway as we were not the only people who got there late, including, it appeared, a lot of the staff.
As for my appointment, we talked to the surgical scheduler and went over all of the pre-op preparations and considerations as well as the expected time-line. First-off we have to be there are 5:30am next Monday as I'm the first procedure of the day, scheduled to start at 7:30am (at least they're not predicting any rain for next Monday and at about 3:00 or 4:00am in the morning, we should be ahead of most of traffic). The total procedure will take about three to four hours and I'll be under a general anesthetic and will be in the hospital at least one and perhaps two nights.
As for any testing, the only physical aspect, other than the normal blood-pressure, temp, pulse rate, etc was a blood draw to type and match my blood in case they need to do any transfusing (which shouldn't be the case if all goes well). I told them that I was 'O+', but they have to be sure so they got my blood anyway 
As for the rest of my time there is was for some non-physiological evaluations. First I spent about 10-15 minutes with a neurologist doing your typical eye-hand-body coordination testing; "Follow my finger with your eyes.", "Hold your arms straight-out for 10 seconds.", "What is today's date and day-of-the-week?", "Where are you?", that sort of stuff. Then I spent 40 minutes with a research technician for a set of cognitive tests; like telling me a list of about eight or nine words and having me repeat back as many of them as I could (they would do this 3 times and then maybe five minutes later, they would ask to try and recall that same list), they would read you a short one paragraph story and ask you to repeat it back as close to word-for-word as you could (again they would do this 3 times and then maybe five minutes later, they would ask to try and recall the story again). They also asked you to draw a simple figure, identify pictures of animals, match symbols in a matrix and in 60 seconds says as many words (no proper names) that begin with the letter 'F' and other things like that. They said that these tests would be repeated at my 30-day and 90-day follow-up visits as the tests were being gone to establish a base-line to make sure that there were no loss of cognitive skills as a result of the surgery. Now I don't know if this is standard procedure but since Cedars-Sinai is a medical research facility that it could be part of their scientific protocol.
We also got to watch a video showing how the operation is performed and they explained, in rather graphic detail, exactly what they were going to do before, during and immediately after the surgery. They also showed us what one of the replacement valve's looks like. They also went over all of the risk factors and outcome statistics.
Anyway, by about 1:00pm we were all done and heading for home.
Next stop, the OR, next Monday morning...
OCU
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