Having surgery? How to prepare

April Snider saw the future flash before her eyes — literally.

While being prepped for laser eye surgery, she watched a nearby monitor as a surgeon sliced into another patient’s magnified eyeball, looming huge and horrific on the screen. The tiny anti-anxiety pill lodged under Snider’s tongue may as well have been a Tic Tac. “I was panicking and sweating and could feel my heart racing. Then I felt the clamp on my eye and saw the scalpel coming toward me. And I smelled the burning flesh of my eyeball.”

In the months leading up to surgery, Snider of Guelph, Ont., followed instructions to wear soft contact lenses (instead of hard) and glasses, but “emotionally and mentally, I didn’t prepare,” admits the 46-year-old. “I got a package of information about what to expect, but I just glanced at it. I had no mental images beforehand of the procedure, so I was dealing with it for the first time. It was so intense, it triggered panic in me.”

Mental preparation makes a huge difference

No wonder. The thought of undergoing surgery instills terror in most of us. And at midlife, a rendezvous with a scalpel is hardly rare. In my circle of friends, women endure everything from breast lifts to hysterectomies to root canals. To get ready, we cook a few casseroles and arrange for help at home afterwards. But how can we mentally prepare for our operating room event? And does it make a difference, anyway?

Deborah Lain, 53, a psychologist in Calgary with a special interest in health psychology, thinks so. When facing major spinal surgery, she refused to be put on a cancellation waiting list that might have helped her bypass the three-month wait. She explained to her surgeon that she needed the emotional prep time. “I told him that I believe in the mind/body connection, and I knew I would play a big role in how my body would respond to my healing.”