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| When you're so bored you start sexting pro enduro racers. It looks weird, but the Bandaid is just covering the saline port, nothing more exciting than that. |
As for the downsides, after more or less losing count of the number of Percocet that I was downing the first week after surgery to manage my pain, I finally got fed up with the associated constipation on Thursday and quit cold turkey once I was allowed to begin ibuprofen again. Ibuprofen isn’t allowed the week before or after the surgery due to bleeding risk. At first quitting the Percocet seemed relatively easy considering that opioid addiction is such a massive problem in the United States today. However, I have noticed that since I stopped, that I’ve gone from being amazingly patient with my situation back to my old irritable, anxious, depressed self again. It’s probably partly the drugs and partly the fact that despite my decreased pain, I’m still so far off from normal life again.
The bane of my existence right now are the surgical drains which will not come out until Monday at best. Most of the women I talked to only had theirs for 6 or 7 days, so 11 seems excruciating for me. I can’t shower until they’re out, they dig into my sides, and I’m tired of having pouches and tubes in the way whenever I go to the bathroom. The benchmark for getting the drains out is less than 20ml of output over two days, so I’m already in the measurement period if I want to get them out on Monday. I can’t do much to affect this except be as still as possible and hope.
I have been super self-conscious about my pale skin and dark body hair since I was a pre-teen, and there are only a handful of times in the last twenty years that I have gone to bed without freshly shaved arms and legs. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, I find a way to make it happen. It’s probably my biggest barrier to doing one of those big multi-day stage races where you have to sleep in a tent between stages. The only other big break I’ve had was when I had my pancreas surgery 8 years ago, and I was in the hospital for a week. I still managed to shower and shave before I went home. Knowing this, you can maybe start to understand what 11 days without a shower is doing to me.
Yesterday was especially tough for me because one of my drains has been leaking, and despite being redressed at my appointment on Wednesday, it was still soaking through to my clothes by Thursday evening. I went back to the doctor on Friday with the hope that they’d just pull it since basically nothing was making it into the drain tube anyway, so what’s the point? Rather just ending my misery, nurse sat there yanking on it for 10 minutes until she came up with 25 ml of new fluid in the bulb. By this point I was bawling my eyes out because it feels so hopeless and out of my control, and all she did was stand there and say a bunch of condescending bullshit about “magic numbers”. I can’t explain how it feels when a person has the power to make a little piece of your nightmare a little less nightmare-like, and they absolutely give no genuine forks regarding your misery.
As angry as I am at her right now, I should pause and acknowledge people who actually have tried to make my suffering a little less. My regular hairstylist washed and dried my hair on Monday for free, and when I posted about how excited I was on Instagram, another friend got me a gift certificate for another blowout, which I got yesterday. I also gave in and took a sort of crappy waste-down bath and shaved my arms and legs yesterday, so I feel a little better. However, the drains are still the biggest barrier between me and normalcy right now, and the thought of having to get through 48 more hours with them is killing me.
Finally, I wanted to mention the whole numb boobs thing since was one of my biggest fears before the surgery, and now I’m actually experiencing it. It was less noticeable before they filled my expanders because my chest was flatter and the fact that I was in so much pain masked the fact that I couldn’t feel anything else. Now that I’m in less pain and have something protruding from chest, it’s really confusing. I have a sense that my body is taking up more space, but a really bad sense of where that space ends. When I hug Frank I get nervous because I can’t tell if I’m pressing too hard or not at all. Since they added the saline, everything feels pokey and pully when I burrow into my pillow fort at bedtime, and then I wake up several times each night unable to feel any of the skin on my chest, in my left armpit, or down the back of my left arm. It still scares me every time because I feel like there’s something wrong like the circulation being cut off to those body parts, although I’m coming to realize this is just the new normal. I’m starting to be less compulsive about shining a light down my shirt every time I wake up to confirm that everything still looks okay, but it’s just really scary when you can’t tell if you’re okay or not from feel.
I’m hoping that this weekend is the low point in my recovery, and that things start to look up once the drains are out. I want to start doing more than just laying around hoping to minimize the how much fluid comes out of me. My plan has always been to start walking on the treadmill at the gym once my drains are out so that I can at least get some exercise even if my arms don’t work. I think it will make me feel a lot better once I can do that.
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