Archive for August, 2009

Freaks, geeks and salad lovers unite

{ August 28, 2009 @ 5:44 am } · { Cutting & Recovery }
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saladWell, once those sluice gates open, they really let rip don’t they? Prune juice was my friend.

It’s Day 9 post-surgery and feeling pretty good. Drove the car today for the first time since and frankly I’m glad I waited this long. Started to reverse park but after that queasy pressure thing kicked in I decided against it and found myself a nice easy straight-in park. Can’t be too careful! Still can’t twist too much or pick-up flat stuff off the ground but that’s the only time there’s any discomfort. Oh yeah, and driving in tight-waisted pants. Not a pleasant experience. Do-able but not pleasant.

Took the last of my bandages off today. First one came off on Day 5 and all but the last were off by Day 7. The last one, the biggie, didn’t look very ready for exposure the world so I left it on a bit longer. Rightfully so. It’s still not looking spectacular and it’s 3 times the size of all the other cuts. It’s pretty damn ugly compared to the others too – it’s crooked and puckered compared the neat straight lines of the rest and has a teeny bit of hard not-yet-dissolved stitch poking out. Sorry for the extreme detail – but I’m hoping that others who go through the same thing get to read this and maybe feel a bit less like a freak knowing it’s normal. Or perhaps it’s not normal and I truly am a freak. Either way, sorry!

I feel I’m gonna be hating that scar for the rest of my life. Smack in the middle of my middle, staring back at me ugly-ly. Oh well, small price to pay really.

My first post-surgery appointment with dietician and surgeon is next week. Looking forward to it.

Starting to get my appetite back slowly. Started out with barely eating a mouthful or two then go to about half a cup and now at about a cup. Still living on soup and branching out as far as scrambled eggs with the odd KickStart thrown in. Not feeling deprived or hungry – from time to time I wish for anything more substantial – actually it’s not really a substance thing, it’s more a flavour thing. There’s not massive differentiation in flavours of soup. I mean I try to keep it as wide as possible, asian to italian to eastern european to english and it works pretty well but still… soup is soup you know.

I am missing salad though. My husband thinks I’m a freak because my last meal before surgery was salad. Normal people, he claimed would want a hamburger or fabulous steak, but that’s not me. I love salad. Always have, always will. And I knew it was going to be a long time before I could digest a bunch of leaves and raw veges so that’s what I wanted. Call me crazy. Whatever. Salad is good! I’d love a bowl of leaves, mozzarella, fresh fig, basil and pinenuts but whaddya gonna do?

Oh yeah, and shoulder pain has gone finalmente! Glad to be rid of that sucker…

Abracadabra! You’re a Rabbit!

{ August 24, 2009 @ 12:58 am } · { Cutting & Recovery }
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reading_in_the_sunIs it possible to go to sleep one person and wake up a completely different one?  Ok not completely different.  But in certain areas…

You know when someone asks “Are you hungry?” and you respond “I could eat.”?  Not anymore dear friends.  Now, I find myself entirely disinterested in food.  I now realise that I used to feel hungry constantly.  Like 24 hours a day.  And I thought about eating or not eating ALL the time.  I mean, I didn’t eat all the time, I often wouldn’t eat a thing till dinnertime but I was thinking about it, that’s for sure.  Now, it barely crosses my mind and I have to be reminded.  It’s very liberating. Don’t know if it will continue but that’s today and today is all I’m focussing on.

Changed in other ways too… not quite so amiable.  Have had a propensity towards lactose intolerance for years.  If you don’t know what that means, well, imagine  steadily building gut pain followed by explosive diarrhoea.  Too much information?  But wait, there’s more!  Now I’m the opposite.  Goddam surgery has got me backed up like a pair of testicles in a snow storm.  They ain’t coming out for nothing.  Yes, I’ve swallowed a bucketload of laxative but still nothing damn it!  Tonight I’m cracking out the prune juice.  Desperate times, people!

And in other physical news, the requisite shoulder pain seems to come and go.  I presume as the post-surgical gas builds up the pain increases because as soon as I burp or fart (my husband is loving me right now!), the pain goes away again.  Till next time of course.

All things considered, it’s Day 5 post-knife-shenanigans and I feel damn good.  Was going massively stir crazy I must say.  I’m really not one for staying in the house for any sort of extended period so the lying in bed (only place I could get comfortable) just about killed me.  Woke up yesterday morning and told my husband he’s taking me for a walk.  Not far, just up to the park behind our house and back again (with a little reading stop in between).  But oh, to have the sunlight on my face and to get my legs moving!  Heaven!!!!

And, for the first time since surgery, I wanted to read.  This is so foreign to me.  I am a voracious reader.  I read for about an hour a day, every day, no matter what.  Since surgery I just can’t engage my brain properly so for the past 4 days I couldn’t bring myself to pick up a book.  Or watch an intellectual movie.  It was all “Confessions of a Shopaholic” and “He’s Just Not that Into You”.  That was as much as I could get a handle on.  But to pick up a book again and read, in the sun, was so restorative.  I feel a thousand times better.

Last night, we even went to the movies.  Thank god, for the oh-so-comfy, stretch-out-able armchairs in Gold Class.  Inglourious Basterds, you were ok but the cushy chair was even better.  The only thing missing was popcorn and a blanket.  Can’t have everything I guess!

That’s Not a Knife, This is a Fecking Knife

{ August 21, 2009 @ 10:09 am } · { Cutting & Recovery }
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barneySo the day, it hath arrived.  God knows how because I was NOT my usual super-organised self.  I really didn’t get my shit together but somehow I got here.  I’ve had pretty much zero sleep but my hair is pretty.  And that’s what’s important on a day like today.

I got to the hospital at 10am as requested. After being shuffled from room to room and nurse to nurse for various uninteresting questions (much the same ones I might add – ie whats your name and what are you allergic too… MSG and lactose intolerant, for christs sake), I disappear on a trolley and husband goes to find himself a spot of lunch (what a prick.  talk about rubbing it in).  Finally at 1pm they wheel me into the theatre.

After flirting oddly with the anaesthetists assistant (I don’t know why, boredom mostly) I apparently became unconscious and some bastard stuck a band around my stomach.  Ha!  I jest of course.

I’m woken up at quarter to 3 in recovery by some annoying bint who wouldn’t let me sleep another minute even though I really wanted to get some more kip.  I feel like there’s a vice around my sternum.  A massive burp would be brillo just about now thanks.  I mean a big old, Barney Gumble rip-snorter.  Ward clerk asks the nurse where to take me, I respond Rio and give him a thumbs up.  Clearly, anaesthetic has left sense of humour well intact.  Thank god.  Where would I be without gold like that?   (Yeah, I’m not just writing that for the sake of an amusing story.  That’s actually what I did.  I really am that kind of tool).

I arrive in room to find husband missing.  Hell hath no fury like a post-anaesthetic woman in a hospital with an absentee husband.  Half an hour later he rushes into the room apologetic and flustered because he’s been waiting outside for an hour and reception can’t work out what room I’m in. Pricks.

Contrary to popular reports and well-meaning advice from anaesthetists and surgeons, I have none of the promised powerful nausea or agonising pain. I am in fact, nausea and pain free.  What a gip!  I do however have an aching shoulder (I’m told they pump a blimp-ful of gas into the abdomen during surgery and something about nerve endings) and a small elephant seems to have taken up residence on my chest.  Lazy bastard!

Brain function is essentially zero.  I watch Confessions of a Shopaholic and He’s Just Not that Into You while husband snoozes on chair beside me.  That’s about the sum total of action in my cerebral cortex right now.  Can’t even manage reading.  Or talking.

Dinner arrives at some point and husband attempts to feed me lukewarm dishwater but it doesn’t appeal.  A quarter of one of those mini-hospital apple juices will do me fine and dandy thanks!

Visiting hours end at 8pm though husband is rampantly starving and can’t wait to get outta there and get food.  God knows why, I’m such sparkling company right now.

Night is spent being woken at odd hours for blood pressure, temperature and blood oxygen checks (good, ok-ish, fair-to-middling) and wandering backwards and forwards to bathroom.  Seemingly never-ending IV drip filled with sugar, salt and water has left my bladder somewhat overworked.  I do wonder why on earth they’re filling the fat chick with sugar and salt but hey, who am I to question?  I have a band.

And it rocks.

See funny on multiple levels cos the band is called “The Band” and the song is called “The Weight”.  Geddit?

Why Will the Phone Not Stop Ringing?

{ August 18, 2009 @ 8:32 am } · { In the Beginning }
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hypercolorFirst it’s the dietician.  With this litany of things I can and cannot do.  2 weeks out from surgery it’s weird-ass diet time for me.  Don’t know if you’ve heard of Optifast? or Sureslim or Tony Ferguson’s?  Well that’s what I have to do for 2 weeks. Liquid fake food.

As it happened our health fund had just asked my husband to participate in a trial of some sort for a new one called Kickstart.  So I got it for free!  It ain’t cheap so this was a big win.  3 synthetic-fruit flavoured shakes 3 times a day.  Plus 2 cups of vegetables a day – to keep you regular. Right on!  I feel like an old woman already.

Kickstart wasn’t so bad.  Tasted ok.  Was pretty filling and each hit was only 139 calories.  I won’t suggest that I was by any means perfect in my adherence to the Kickstart diet.  I had family birthdays and work lunches that were unavoidable.  And I had more salad than I was supposed to most days.  But I still lost about 8kg in that two weeks so can’t complain about that!

Next I got a phone call was from the anaesthetist office.  We sent you an invoice that said you needed to pay the fee of $1200 a week before surgery.  The bill arrived a week before surgery.  Thanks for the notice guys.  The call came 3 days later.  So there’s another $1200 I’ve gotta pony up this week.  Hadn’t really planned on that sucker.  Oh well, good thing it’s pay day!

Finally I got a call from the hospital.  With a litany of questions and instructions that just did my head in.  Clearly the caller had read this list out a million, trillion, billion times.  For me it was my first time and it was WAAAAAY too quick and WAAAAAY too much.  An email follow-up would be have been a worth while exercise cos I forgot stuff I was supposed to do (like showering with anti-bacterial wash for 2 days beforehand – oops).  Fortunately noone seemed to give a toss on the day.

The day before surgery the hospital called again.  This time to tell me I have to pay $475 dollars on check-in.  I mean, admission.  Well, there’s another few buckaroos I hadn’t budgeted for.

All of these calls were so brain numbing. Not in a boring sense… in a I can’t compute sense… too much.

But none of that came close to what was going on in my head.

Second thoughts?  Lordy yes!  None of it seemed real to be honest, until the call came asking for my money.  Then it became so real.  Hyper-real.  In living colour.  Hyper-colour, in fact.  Or not.  (I’ll let the joke go now, I’m not one to cling.  Or am I?).

I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do.  Fear of the unknown was paralysing in many ways.  My ignorance and stupidity was profoundly daft.  For example, I mistakenly believed I would have a hole in my side for the rest of my life.  There is no hole.  I am just an idiot.  Thank god my husband is not.  Many shed tears will attest to my unbounded relief.  Really though, I just questioned everything I was doing.  Then I ignored it and put my head in the sand.  Then I got excited and philosophical.  It changed from day to day.

In the end I stuck with it.  I chose NOT to let my fear paralyse me any more.  God, now I sound like Tony Robbins.  Or the father from Little Miss Sunshine.  Or Tom Cruise in Magnolia.  (let the joke go, loser!).  I just kept on keeping on.  I took faith from those around me who never faltered.  Who believed in me and what I had decided to do.  And so I went under the knife.

And that was that.

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