hi all,
today marks one week since i had my surgery. i still am pretty sore in my belly but i have gotten use to drinking the protein mix.
i'll start at the beginning of surgery day.
i had to be there at 7:30 in the morning which meant getting up at 5am to shower and get ready to go. we were leaving at 6:30 but my daughter was so excited that she got here at 6:05. she still had to wait a bit because i wasn't ready yet. still we were on the road by 6:15. she had time to stop and get some breakfast before we got to the hospital. we got there and tuxedo boy who was suppose to meet me was in a meeting. since we knew where we were going thanks to the previous trial run we went on up. they tucked us in a waiting room and said they would come get us in a bit. that was different, it didn't happen the last time, but ok. then a little while later my doctor pops his head in and asked to talk to me out in the privacy(?) of the hall. he said that he usually reserves two operating rooms so he doesn't have to keep waiting for the one to be cleaned up and things go pretty smoothly. most of the time. ( warning bells here.) then he said there had been an accident and his other room was being borrowed and he wasn't sure he could do my surgery that day. oh lord, not again!!!! then he told me to please wait around until his next surgery was done and then he would make his decision then. well i'm there and not about to go all the way back home if i don't have to. (drinking that stuff that cleans you out is no picnic and if i didn't have to do it a third time i wasn't about to) so i waited. about an hour an a half later he comes back and said all was well. the second emergency surgery could be postponed a bit and i was back in. then they came and took me to a pre-op prep room. i got to walk all the way through the nurses station in a gown 3 sizes to big for me again to get weighed. then they gave me a shot to thin my blood and we filled out paperwork again. they then took me down to the operating prep room. where i got to watch a anesthesiologist try to teach his young trainee on how to put in a line. i said good luck and watched. it took him three tries and he was very red in the face by the time he got a vein to co-operate. the trainee thanked me very much after he left. she said, that took the wind out of his pompous butt and he would be easier to work with the rest of the day. i smiled and said your welcome, glad to help. i watched the world go by my little cubicle for awhile and then i didn't know anything until i woke up in recovery. recovery is recovery. they keep you there until you are coherent and then send you up to the surgical recovery floor. one minor note about recovery was this man who cried and howled and screamed like a big baby. so i get up on my designated floor get all settled in and a couple of hours later i hear this familiar crying, screaming, howling sound. i could hear the fear and terror in that voice and felt so bad for him. i would hear him off and on for my whole 2 day stay at the hospital. i later found out the he had emotional/ mental problems and that the nurses were having some very bad problems with him. i heard the head nurse say at one point that if he gets that bad again they were to call security at once. for his safety as well as theirs. ice chips were my friend, it was so dry there. they kept an eye on my blood sugars and gave me shots accordingly. i have never had insulin before but i couldn't take pills so it was that or nothing. which is what i got after i came home. my doctor took me off of my diabetes meds. i hated staying in bed all day so every time i could i would take off for walks around the floor which seems to have been the perfect thing to do. the doctor when he came in the next day couldn't believe how agile i was. he would have let me go home that night but i live so far away he decided to keep me overnight and let me go home in the morning. so now i'm home, my bs range from 129 at the lowest to 163 at the highest. i have been on a liquid diet all week. one ounce every 15 minutes totaling 60 ounces. 24 of those ounces has to be a protein mix. that was hard to get use to at first. as any restart to a system it takes time to get all the burps and toots and misfires straightened.out. the protein drink at first felt very heavy and took the longest to get use to. for the first few days at home i tried to sleep in my bed but i gave it up as a lost cause and started sleeping in my recliner. i actually started getting sleep then. as you can imagine i am trying very hard not to cough or sneeze or even laugh to hard. that isn't fun. i guess what everyone wants to know is about is the pain. yes there is pain. but it's not bad. i had a hysterectomy in 99 and that was way worse then this. i was given a script for pain to bring home on thursday. i stopped taking it saturday morning and haven't had any since then. yes it helps with the pain but i don't like feeling like a space cadet to achieve it.
if anyone has any questions that i can answer please ask. i would love to answer them.
debb...............