Frankie82
On the mend
Aug 10, 2014
Well, it’s been 4 days since my surgery. The actual surgery went pretty smooth (started on time, ended on time, and the process was as the anaesthesiologist described). The snag was my surgeon left for holiday (for a month) immediately after my surgery, so I had some technical questions I wanted to ask him that will have to wait. The anaesthesiologist wasn’t happy with my IV site that he found, but he told me it would work and then he’d change it when I was out and couldn’t feel it (very grateful he did that as he put it in my forearm so I could still use my hands, but I know I would have felt that one a lot).
The nursing staff was great! I managed to score a private room which I didn’t know about until I was in recovery being moved to my room. I was out of surgery around 10am, into my room by 12, and then my sister came to visit at 1. I asked her to help me and we went for a walk around 1:30 and I think that helped a lot with the gas pain from surgery. I didn’t have any weird back/shoulder pain that I was expecting from being inflated.
I do have a few must bring items that I recommend: chap stick (dry lips and no drinking is not fun!) sugar-free halls (my voice was shot and my throat burned from being intubated during surgery) ballet flats (you need to walk, but can’t bend forward to put on shoes) an eye mask (think of Blanche from the Golden Girls) and a modified night gown. In my pre-surgery email from here, one user suggested cutting the shoulder seams of a night gown and then using Velcro so you can do them up. Worked great because I could put it on myself, I didn’t have to worry about my IV lines, and I didn’t have my bum hanging out, flapping in the breeze like I would have if I had worn a hospital gown :)
I am concerned about pooping. On the day before my surgery, I had to do a colon cleanse (two packages of pico-silex and then a bottle of magnesium citrate, which was liquid hell in a bottle). Now, I know there was physically nothing left in me after that, and I did not have anything on surgery day aside from ice chips, a bit of broth on day 2, day 3 was ¼ cup protein mix and ¼ cup soup, and so far today has been ¼ cup rice cereal and ¼ cup soup. That all adds up to a whole heap of nothing, so I don’t really expect a BM. I am passing gas (I sound like an outboard motor) and I have started to take Colace as a preventative measure, but I just feel like something should be happening.
