Operation Week

From Friday the 28th to Wednesday the 3rd I consumed a TOTAL of less than 1,600 calories (I was keeping track with My Fitness Pal.) Obviously this meant I had no energy and felt constantly as if I was about to fall over dead. I was dragging prettyyy hard by Wednesday and just barely got R to preschool and then myself to a pre-op appointment where my doctor turned off my stimulator for surgery.

Thursday the 4th was my surgery. I wasn't allowed to eat anything after midnight but I wasn't really hungry because I was running on adrenaline. I checked into the hospital at 11am and my surgery was at 1pm. I believe I got into recovery around 4, but everything post-surgery was kind of a blur. I woke up in a lot of pain and had a little bit of nausea which worried me because this surgery means I can't throw up, and I'd have been in a whole mess of trouble if my body had tried. I wanted to avoid the recovery nurses having to give me painkillers, but about half an hour into waking up I was involuntarily moaning in pain so they blessedly gave me a couple doses of fentanyl (great stuff) while they waited for a room to open up.

When I got up to my post-op room N was there (bless him) and I was in a lot of pain again so the nurses started giving me dilaudid (not as great) and IV phenegran (painful but knocked me out.) I was scheduled for a barium swallow in the morning to make sure my pylorus incision wasn't leaking, so they wouldn't let me have anything other than ice chips. I wasn't that hungry anyway, but I felt like I was dying of thirst. They almost took my ice chips away and I was like, over my dead body. I slept for the majority of that evening/ night and into the morning.

On Friday morning they still would only let me have ice chips (so it had been a full week since I had really eaten) and my barium swallow kept getting pushed back. The nurses wanted me to start walking the halls to ease my shoulder pain from the gas they use in laparoscopic surgery, but I was running on literally, LITERALLY nothing so there was no way that was going to happen.

They finally wheeled me down to the x-ray room around 1, and I had to wait outside for another hour because the woman who had gone before me threw up everywhere. Yeah, barium tastes like urine flavored car fluid. It is AWFUL. But this time I didn't ugly cry and managed to get through the whole test. The test came back showing a significant motility delay (duh) but it showed that my pylorplasty wasn't leaking which meant I had the ok to go home. Unfortunately my oxygen kept dipping and I was in a metric fuckton of pain, so I decided to stay one more night.

On Saturday morning- despite not getting up to walk once- I managed to get out of the hospital which was a blessing and a curse. I missed my own bed and no longer wanted a giant needled shoved in my arm (and a giant drainage tube stuck in my side- that was interesting) but I was going to miss IV pain meds and friendly nurses. Seriously, bless nurses. All of them. What a job. I love you.

I laid in bed for the rest of the weekend, and tried not to take many painkillers. My shoulders were killing me, and my abdomen was very sore. As the week has gone by I've been moving around more and more, and I feel like my body- aside from my digestive track- has healed from the surgery. Externally it wasn't as difficult a surgery as my last one, but internally it was much more complicated and thus my recovery has been a lot more complicated. More on that in the next post!