May 20, 2014

On What It's Like To Have Surgery

It's officially postop day seven, and I'm sitting here, scratch that, lying here in bed with my hip on ice. I'm off the narcotics now, so I figured now is as good a time as any to write a blog post about this whole experience.

The good news is that my hip pain has mostly resolved following surgery, which makes me feel encouraged about my decision to go through with the surgery.  If you didn't hear, I hurt my left hip Climbing only to find out that I had a congenital malformation that was only fixable with surgery. In spite of the fact that I work with surgeons, I have a bit of a severe aversion to surgery, but it seemed like the best option at the time so here I am. 

I'm just a little bit sore. Which is not me using literary understatement, I'm actually quite surprised by how little pain I've had. After surgery they kept me in the hospital overnight on a Toradol drip, and I'm mildly convinced that Toradol is the best invention of all time. Staci took me to surgery, and literally five minutes after I got back to my room, I was up, had changed back into my regular clothes, I had peed (Am I allowed to say that on my blog? Urinated?) and I felt like going on a walk. I thought, well, this is no big deal. Mr Sean, who bless his heart, received nothing but completely amorous musings and my very reasonable demand that he sit by my bed and hold my hand every waking second was kind enough to keep a supply of Taco Bell coming all week long because what can I say? I'm a classy girl. 

Then there was the middle of the night when I woke up in excruciating pain. It happened every night for 3 nights straight. It may have changed my views on epiduralless childbirths. Needless to say, there was a lot of crying involved. 

Speaking of crying, I seriously cannot remember the last time I went more than 24 hours without bursting into tears. I hardly know what to say to people anymore. I cry if it hurts, I cry when I'm lightheaded, I cry when I look at my face in the mirror and see how pale and pasty I've become. Yesterday I woke up thinking about how great it would be to go for a swim until I remembered that that's not currently possible, and I made it through that little incident without crying, which I take as a major victory honestly.

I told one my professors I had had surgery, and he "graciously" agreed to allow me a two day extension on my homework. I literally burst into tears when Jenn walked into my house at 9 PM the day before my homework was due and made me get my laptop out and define 10 key terms related to gerontology. I don't care to mention how long it took my neurons to put together this one page assignment, I will only say that without Jenn, it wouldn't have been possible. 
 
So now I'm headed to physical therapy where they'll hopefully take me off bedrest and maybe give me some sort of magic pill to dissolve my lightheadedness and allow me to do more than 10 minutes of biking twice a day. Although, I'm pretty sure that if they do that, I will burst into unrelenting tears, not that that's anything we haven't been exposed to daily this week. 


1 comment:

  1. It's probably a good thing to burst into tears a lot when things are stressful. It makes things better :) And it was probably awesome for Mr S to hold your hand all of the times.

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