As I understand it, the surgery itself went smoothly. There was a lot of hurry up and wait that morning - we arrived early and sat around until they were ready for me. I turned my phone off and put it away, so I really was just sitting, waiting, trying not to let the anxiety take over. All the prep took some time - wardrobe change, various tests, assorted pokes and prods for multiple IVs. The last thing I remember is being wheeled into the operating room - very bright, very white, almost like Willy Wonka's WonkaVision studio. They had me tilt my chin up (the better to insert the breathing tube) and take some deep breaths. Rather suddenly the clean, crisp oxygen tasted bitter and gross. I think someone let me know that was the anesthesia... and then I was out.
Unfortunately, my next memory is waking up seriously nauseous. While I don't think anyone really enjoys vomiting, it's worth noting that I am really, truly, exceptionally bad at it. It's almost funny - or it would be, if it weren't so viscerally uncomfortable. I'll spare you a more vivid description... Suffice to say, none of the standard anti-nausea meds worked. I alternated between puking bile and sleeping, and they ran through all kinds of meds that the nurses had never heard of. It took about six hours (I think? Time was weird that day), but then I seemed to be in the clear.
They moved me to a recovery room, skipping the ICU. Everyone seemed very pleased with my progress, but I must admit, I was feeling a little traumatized by the bad anesthesia reaction. Medical professionals truly have seen it all, though, so they seemed happy enough that I had moved on to the next phase of recovery, and kept telling me how well I was doing. They even suggested I could go home the next day (Thursday), if I felt up to it... I'm sure the look I gave them was somewhat short of polite... I did NOT feel up to it; more nervous than physically unwell, but still not ready to be away from the hospital.
I hung out all day Thursday, slowly working through all the benchmarks of improvement and gaining mobility and confidence. The following day, Friday, I did go home, and that's where I've been since.
I have a bit of a black eye, swelling around my forehead and ear, a very neat line of stitches along my (fairly large) incision, bruises on my face and wrists... I can't raise my left eyebrow (which is much stranger than I expected, despite feeling like The Rock).
The journey to recovery is... well, it's not linear, I can tell you that. I think I imagined that every day would be just a little bit better than the one before, moving along incrementally like steps on a road to a physical destination. But it hasn't really gone that way for me. So far, some days I seem to have a reasonable amount of energy and some days I just want to sleep; some days I am tired but can't really sleep; some days I have more sharp pain than the previous day; some times my incision is itchier than others. I also have difficulty focusing on things in ways that are deeply frustrating. Looking at a screen too closely or even just trying to concentrate on a half hour television program, I take a lot of breaks. Writing this blog post, too - lots of starts and stops.
I'm trying to take it all in stride, and be okay with the fact that my body and my brain aren't quite aligned in the ways that they used to be. The doctors prepared me as much as they could for the fact that things would be difficult, but there's hearing it and there's living it... I'm hanging in there, and I'm probably doing fairly well overall, but it's still harder than I realized it would be.
Hopefully the next round of news will be more in the way of progress. For now I'm just doing what I can, following doctors' orders, hoping for more little slivers of improvement where I can grab them.
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