One Last Look Ahead

Well, this is it.

After 5 months and 90 blog posts, this is the last post I will make before the day of my surgery (July 25, 3 days from today.)

On Monday, at 7:30 AM (MST), I will get taken back to pre-op, and within a couple of hours, my whole life will change. Again. After 80% of my stomach is removed, I will get moved out to the general population of the hospital for a couple of days. There, I will sleep or shuffle slowly back and forth around the hallways, hauling my IV rack around behind me. Until, on Wednesday, they send me home, where I will collapse into a real bed for about a week or so.

Where am I getting this vision of the future from? I just watched Lor go through it, about 5 weeks ago. It took her three weeks to really get her feet back under her, and I know darn well she is tougher than I am. I am resigned to some quality bed time post-surgery.

I will continue to keep everyone informed as usual - my next blog post will be from the hospital, either immediately pre- or post-surgery. Let's go with "pre". Lord only knows what I would say if I wrote something immediately after surgery. Anesthesia can do some strange stuff to the mind.

How do I feel about it? A mixture of dread and relief. Dread because I hate hospitals sooo much. Relief because I will at least be done with waiting. Lor even informs me that I will be done with feeling like I am constantly starving, so there is that to look forward to. 

Curiously, I am not afraid of the procedure itself. We have picked some amazingly competent surgeons in a world-class organization focused exclusively on bariatric surgery. After some of the horror stories we have heard and read about these procedures being performed by less experienced doctors, we are so glad that ABQ Health Partners Bariatrics was available to us.

I am, admittedly, kinda worried about the "5 shanks and a boot knife" results, but 5 weeks out Lor is already rocking and rolling with pretty much full use of her core muscles, so I suppose I have real evidence in front of me that it isn't as bad as it looked. 'Cause boy, did it look bad.

Mainly, I am ready to get home on Wednesday, so I can lie around and binge-watch all the shows I have been stacking on Netflix, and go through my old DVD collection. 

I will keep everyone in the loop as things progress. Only 72 hours to go.

Ready For That Tasty Hospital Food,

- Hawkwind

Surgery: It's A Thing, Man.

But you should see what the other guy looks like.

It has been noted in the past that significant life events seem to happen in groups. Boy howdy, does that seem to be getting proved out around these parts. Here in our household both of the lovely ladies I cohabitate with, Loralia and Vixen (pictured above), have now had surgery in the past two weeks, and for both of them, the surgery has looked like No Fun At All. Leaving me to speculate on the upcoming surgical procedure that awaits me in 25 days. 

I am not sure where I got this impression that surgery was going to be no big deal. It has certainly not been my experience in the past. My VNS installation and later repair were certainly not life-shattering surgeries, but my knee surgery in 2014 most certainly was - I was in pain for months afterwards, and to this day have to wear a knee brace when expecting to walk anything more than a short distance. Surgery is invasive. It hurts. And it takes a long time to recover from.

Watching my ladies suffer through the recovery from their surgeries has made me hyper-aware of the fact that this train is coming for me too. Once upon a time I had been concerned only with the difficulty of the liquid diet before the surgery and the greatly reduced diet post surgery, not thinking too much about the procedure itself. Nowadays, I find that I am thinking more and more about the surgical process, and wondering what it is going to do to me and mean for me.

Just like Lor, I am going to have 5 holes punched into my abdomen to insert instruments, along with a sixth just below the breast line to work on a hiatal hernia. 80% of my stomach is going to be chopped off, then pulled out of my body via a slit only about an inch wide. (How is THAT for weird?) The hole that remains is then going to be stapled shut, creating a tube-sock looking stomach remnant about the same size of a small banana. My belly will inflate like a gigantic beach ball (again) due to all the gases being pumped into my system. The surgical team will then super-glue the holes on my abdomen shut (not a joke - I have seen the stuff on Lor's post-surgical wounds), and call it a day.

Just like Vixen, I do not respond well to anaesthesia. It takes me longer than normal to recover from the effects, and it occasionally causes me to have seizures in recovery or shortly after surgery. Recovery is painful and takes a few weeks. And I am not a great patient, which will surely test everyone's patience with me.

These are the things that go through my mind as I have been caring for first Lor and now Vixen after their surgeries. I am doing my best to be just as kind and considerate as I can be - trying to develop myself a positive balance on the post-surgical care karma card. I am not exactly afraid of the surgery (though I am still quite afraid of the hospital where I will be staying for 3 days.), but I am no longer thinking of it as a short and easy phase that will be passed through without any trouble.

I just keep reminding myself that this, too, will pass. 2 months from today I will be looking at this whole thing in the rear-view mirror, right? Let's hope that I get through it as well as the ladies in my life have.

Trying Hard To Imitate My Stoic Ladies,

- Hawkwind