Well, I'm back! I've actually been back since around March 4th, but I'm on drugs, so I actually "arrived" around last Saturday, lol.
My surgery only took about 4 hours. I stayed in the ICU for a night, because they left me with that nasty tube in my throat for an extra few hours due to protocol. For some reason, because the surgery is done with the patient on their bellies, they have a ton of swelling afterwards and have trouble breathing on their own. And by swelling, I mean excessive facial swelling. I looked as though I had received a new kidney and was rejecting it. I'll have to post pictures if I ever get the balls.
On the bright side, I got a toy called a PCA for the first few days of my stay. Full of dilaudid, which I played with a lot. So the pain didn't actually set in till my dilaudid pump went away and I developed a wonderful thing called "ogilvies syndrome," which is something that occasionally happens in response to major surgeries like mine. It's some sort of rush of your fight or flight hormones, which causes a wonderful array of symptoms, such as feeling like I was having heart attacks, and even more fun than that, my guts stopped working.
So when I thought the most fun I ever had throwing up was when I was 8 months pregnant with food poisoning, I was mistaken. Replace it with throwing up constantly right after major back surgery.
The ironic thing about it was that the pain medication was actually making my problems worse. So the doctors basically told me that I needed to cut down on my pain medication as infrequently as possible as well as eat nothing until it resolves itself. By the way, I haven't mentioned that I honestly had 30 different doctors telling me completely opposite things. So I stopped taking my pain medication, and they stopped feeding me. That's when I realized that I felt exactly like anyone would expect me to feel. Like I had a cookie rack down my back.
It took 10 days to resolve itself. I was in terrible pain, and they started a long term IV in my arm to feed me with IV nutrition. Day 7, my surgeon came in and told me I was nuts for cutting down on my pain medication and who the heck ever told me to do such a thing, (his idiot white coats told me to do it). It was like being on bad acid. A different story with every doc. So, with little argument, I went back on my pain medication and I was better in 2 days and home on the third. I felt a hell of a lot better.
There have been constant battles and adventures every step of my recovery, most of which may turn out to be a great blog, but I'm home now, and I feel great. I can definitely vouch for a good bowel obstruction to take some weight off you- I'd rather exercise next time, but hey, I'm skinny again (lost about 20 lbs), and straight. (In all senses of the word.) You can barely even see my scar, my surgeon did a great job stitching me up instead of stapling, and I even bought my new summer swimsuit from Vicki's last weekend!
So since I've nothing better to do, maybe I can work in some of the adventures I had along the way. I have a good 5 blogs or so to catch up on. Peace.
