Musings from surgery
I’m still not quite back to 100%, but here’s a lil thing to get me back into the writing habit. To be honest, I’ve got some fierce writer’s block at the moment, so I'm hoping this will help unblock me a little bit.
If you tell the staff your concerns up front, they’ll try to do something about them. I told my anaesthetist that one of my concerns was nausea and vomiting after waking, as that’s how my body tends to react to things it doesn’t know what to do with. I did feel nausea when I woke up, but they had anti-nausea meds ready to go when I asked for them.
Pain is treated differently post-surgery. I have chronic pain. A 3 out of 10 is…fine. Not ideal, but nothing a doctor will generally give you anything for. A 3 out of 10 when waking up from surgery? I got a dose of morphine. It was oramorph, which is a relatively low dose, but it was still morphine. I was expecting ibuprofen or something. It made me spacey as shit. My partner joked it was because they knew the next step was for me to eat food and wanted to take my mind off the terrible food (The food wasn’t that bad, just wasn’t that good either).
There is a blank space in my memory, when I woke up from anaesthesia and the breathing tube was removed. The anaesthetist told me that even when people are conscious enough to react to words and will cooperate with the tube being removed, the vast majority of people have no memory of it. I have no memory. I wouldn’t have known it had happened if the anaesthetist hadn’t told me beforehand.
In therapy, that little bit was the thing that I was most concerned about, weirdly. The idea that there would be an amount of time that I would have no idea about. I don’t know how I’d react to the anaesthesia, and I didn’t know how much control I’d have, and I wouldn’t remember any of it.
I don’t do well with not knowing and not being in control, and this is what my brain had fixated on. Everything else I was relatively fine with, it was just that little bit of time that was the problem. I’m still not entirely comfortable, afterwards, but I’m accepting it as something I’ll never know, so I can put it to one side.
It still lingers in my mind, wondering what I was like, how I handled it, etc, but I have to remind myself that I’ll never know.
The staff knew what to expect, and they knew how to deal, and no one came and told me that I reacted any particular way, so I’m assuming/hoping that I was a run of the mill patient. In fact the last thing I told my anaesthetist was that I hoped I was a boring patient for them.
Speaking of, my anaesthetist was the wellbeing lead for the surgical and anaesthetist staff at the hospital, so we chatted wellbeing as I was being prepped. He was also squeamish. He asked if I was wearing jewellery, I replied that I’d taken it all out that morning. He asked if there was a lot to remove. I replied that I have 9 piercings. He shuddered and told me not to tell him about them. He then cannulated me, with an 18G needle (which he said out loud). 18G is a fairly normal size needle to be pierced with. The irony.
I was craving a burger as I left the hospital, so we got burger king on the way home (the closest burger place to us) and I ate a whopper (that I had to deconstruct because swallowing was difficult for the first week or so). It was genuinely delicious. I couldn’t eat the fries, they were too sharp and chewy.
I ate a lot of soup and soft bread, and it took a loooong time to eat.
The first time I swallowed without pain after surgery, I thought there was something wrong for a moment. I was so accustomed to pain that the lack of it was a shock.
I found it easier to rest than I expected. I’m generally not that good at resting, or not being productive. I like to do things in general. I had plenty of things to distract me, but I did find myself sleeping or resting more than expected, which is good for healing. I’m now at the stage where I’m still tiring easily, but I want to do things. I’m managing to balance it well, pushing myself gently without really pushing it, but it’s going to be difficult to manage as I get better.
I’m currently very aware that I’m limited in what I can carry and how long I can walk. I normally do the food shopping in the household, loading up my backpack and walking to and from the supermarket a couple of times a week. I miss doing food shopping? Or maybe I miss the time to myself, planning food, and maybe getting a little sweet treat as a reward.
(Also school bags are heavy. My backpack with just the supplies I need (textbook, work to hand in, ipad), weighs 2.4kg, and I can carry 5kg max. My lunch and flask of tea will take up a chunk of the rest of that).
My keffiyeh is great for hiding/protecting the incision site. The dressing is off, but it’s still obvious I’ve had surgery, and will be for a while. This means it’s covered so people aren’t weirded out/asking questions if I’m not in the mood, but also warm in the cold weather (also Free Palestine).
I’m still tired a lot. I’m tired and I’m not really engaging with work, which is frustrating because I want to and I enjoy doing it, but my brain is fighting me. I assume this is at least in part because I’m still recovering and so the fatigue is ridiculous. I’m hoping over the next few weeks, as I recover, my fatigue will drop and I’ll be back to normal functioning.
All said, it was a pretty easy surgery, and recovery hasn’t been too bad at all. I’m grateful I was able to take time to rest, and focus on my course over freelancing. I’m grateful to all of you for sending me well wishes and sticking with me while I’ve been inconsistent. I have some exciting things planned for the next few weeks and I can’t wait to share them with you.
Take it easy, folks