Home At Last

This has been one H*#@ of a journey.

I'm home now. Sitting on the couch. My own couch in the living room. I left this room Monday afternoon to trek to the nearby town where my wife and I stayed in a hotel, and now I'm finally back the following Friday.

I hurt quite a bit. Right now I have a small arsenal of staples in my gut and a rubbery plastic "grenade" sticking out of me. Every time I try to move I feel the staples pulling on my abdomen. These pains have been...challenging.

I managed to use the bathroom twice; once I needed help standing, once I managed to do it on my own. I can't get up from the couch without help yet. I have managed to stand from my chair on my own.

So...it's extremely frustrating. But it's getting better. A caregiver told me that this will be the hardest month of this change, and this first week will be the hardest of that month. I believe it...I'm already looking forwards quite anxiously to Tuesday, when I expect to have the staples and drain removed. I can't even think of what is going to go on this weekend...I just hear the word "Tuesday" echoing in my head.

I've come a long way. Tuesday I had the surgery, so early in the morning; I woke up in extreme pain in the Recovery area of the hospital, bleeding and crying for something to alleviate the pain coursing through my stomach. They gave me more drugs and slowly, slowly, slowly, the pain faded. but then I wasn't breathing properly. A side effect of the epidural, I was told. I'd start to doze or nod off slightly and then an alarm would sound...that alarm became quite the close buddy over the next few nights...telling the nurse that I wasn't breathing. They'd feed more oxygen to me and it just didn't seem to be helping enough. I was in Recovery for eight hours. The nurse assigned to me...there is one on one nursing in Recovery...became somewhat attached to me in our limited exchanges. She said that normally a patient would be in recovery for much less than an hour; wake up, ship off to ICU or another ward. I was an exception that day. I was to be closely watched because of these complications for, well, eight hours. We'd talk a little then I'd be jolted back to a fully awake status by her voice telling me to breathe.

Then I'd bleed. A doctor was consulted; he come into the curtain for a cursory examination and then proceeded to add three more staples to stem the bleeding. Not much pain, but thank the deities that I had the epidural in my system.

My wife was already debriefed by the surgeons about my breathing issues and that I was in Recovery, despite the operation being a rousing success. She was the first one in the Day-Surgery waiting room and the last one to leave while waiting for me to leave Recovery; I can't imagine how she felt waiting for an update when she was supposed to see me after just a couple hours.

Finally I was moved to the second floor and into my single-occupancy room. I was so glad to see her and relieved at my luck at having a single room. Unfortunately, while I was mostly stabilized on the breathing issue after reducing my pain killers and increasing O2, the bleeding wasn't stopping.

All night, about every hour and a half to two hours, I'd be woken up from my pained, fitful sleep by the trickle of blood that was overflowing the mounds of sponges and gauze taped to my midsection and had begun pooling around my hips on the bed. Every time the nurses would change my dressings and again change the sheets and mats, forcing painful shifting of my position or standing in order to make the alterations. I had earlier been taken on my promised walk of the hallway for recovery, but it was cut short when the nurse realized I had a trail of blood on the floor following me.

Early in the morning...I don't remember if it was near four or five...I became aware that I was starting to lose it. I remember asking the nurses what was wrong with me. I wanted to cry. I felt weak, I was tired, and I had watched handfuls of clot-covered gauze by the fistful being pulled off my sleep-addled body. I was becoming miserable, wondering what the hell I'd gotten myself into.

A doctor came in that morning. I successfully stemmed the bleeding problem by applying (painful) pressure to the specific point where I was bleeding from the incision. He had me hold that point for ten minutes after he packed on some specific chemical-laced gauze from the surgical wing and it just stopped bleeding. He "milked" the clot-stuck drain, one which was removed before I came home, and since then I began making progress in recovering.

Every day things have become a little easier to do. I'm pulling muscles because I'm straining to get up using my side instead of my abdomen; I even strained my neck muscles and I'm not sure how I did that.

Now I need to adjust to recovery here. I have a constant fear that either the dog...an 80 pound doberman with the brain of a sponge...or my four year old boy will hit or leap on me. My little guy already forgot once in and leaned on my, hand outstretched, to crawl on to the couch with me, forgetting completely that daddy has a gaping wound on his tummy. Fortunately I bit back the yelp that would have scared him half to death. He also was playing with a toy that went wild from his hand and, of course, bounced off my stomach. Of course I add to my own stress by having to bite back sudden emotional frustration when the children or the dogs or just anything in life is making me want to scream. Quite frankly, the recovery process itself has shortened that tolerance considerably, and my wife will tell you it wasn't that long to begin with.

I just need to hang on a little while longer. And the first SOB that says this was the "easy way out" for losing weight is going to get a bat to the face, because so far I'm not finding the easy part in all this.