Alive and Kicking Like A Rockette

 So there is some infection in the incision under my left arm. The surgeon looked at it, cleaned it really well, gave me yet another two antibiotics (one oral, one topical) and then showed Dave how to dress it. We'll have to do dressing changes three times a day (she suggested two, I suggested three and she said if I could stand it, it would be better to do three). Then she gave us some wound care materials (sponges, saline wash, povidine swabs) to use. 

It's not a comfortable process for any of us, but at least I have Tylenol with codeine to help on my end. 

We came back to the hotel room and changed the sheets on my bed. (I'm using disposable sheets because I don't trust hotel sheets.) I was exhausted by then so I lay down. Poor Dave's day continued. He went to Trader Joe's to pick up some provisions, then to Walgreens for the new prescription, then to another grocery store for soy milk and a few things that Trader Joe's doesn't carry. After he got back, I took more pain meds in anticipation of the next dressing change.

The surgeon thinks it should take about five days to turn things around. We'll only be here another seven days, so hopefully that prediction is correct (and we don't end up in the ER with me on IV antibiotics). 

I just took the second antibiotic--Cephalexin, 500 mg--so now just waiting for the anaphylactic reaction to kill me. (This is how my brain works, in case you were wondering how health anxiety manifests itself in my life.) 

So far so good. But it's only been about five minutes. I'm still alive and kicking.

We took an Uber to the surgeon's office, the second time I've been in an Uber. Ubers still freak me out. Also, why does every Uber driver wear all the cologne? Is it part of their contract. Two of the three Uber drivers we've had have worn all the cologne in the world. It's like the Axe Body Spray Wars were fought in the backseat of their cars. It's even better when you consider that my oxygen concentrator is CONCENTRATING that odorous poison and sending it straight up my nose. That's really the best part of Uber as far as I'm concerned.

I'd say that it's different with taxis, but it's not. The taxi driver from the airport also was wearing all the cologne. And the one we had on the way to the hospital also had bathed himself in all the cologne and then apparently opened another bottle and gargled with it. Because why not?

I understand the addictive personality way of thinking ("If one is good, a thousand must be AMAZING!") but I don't see how this applies to cologne, or any scented thing really. It smells like dying brain cells to me.

Okay, ten minutes in and I'm still alive. (Though I'm not sure it's ten minutes. Maybe it's only been nine.)

Of course Dave has final say, but here are some things that should be on record: My friend Grace gets one of my sewing machine. The Janomes are the most user friendly.  My Juki is the best machine I own, but it is not user friendly and it only does a straight stitch. You can't even zig zag stitch on it and forget all those decorative stitches that make life fun. Anyway, Grace can also have any of my art supplies--and can share the rest with the artist whom our cat has recently fallen in love with. After that, they can send the rest to the art space at the same place as Healthcare for the Homeless is.

My mom can have the pick of my quilts, if she wants any. My aunt Char and Kelly and Kevin, too. I don't really have anything else of value and none of them sews so maybe they'd like a quilt or two.  

Dave came in and sat with me while I had a snack and then he got into his pajamas and is now in bed, napping. He's as exhausted by all this as I am, so spare him a thought or ten while you all are sending good and healing vibes my way.

My journals I'd like to have sent to the American Diary Project.  I have years and years of paper and art journals. Maybe they'll be of interest to someone someday. 

It's fifteen minutes and I'm still alive, so there's that.

I do have to go to the bathroom though, so I'll finish this up later. 

 

Discharged

The anger woke me up: I was made so incredibly angry at an argument I was having with a firefighter who had gone off to tell stories about fighting fires while there was an active fire I was helping to fight. He had taken the light I was using so that he could go meet with his buddies to talk about fighting fires, leaving me in the dark, helping to load hoses onto a fire truck with one unsteady old man.

This is the way of the world, I think. 

I just did something stupid:

It's cold in our room (no heat, no reason for it in Miami hotel rooms usually), 64 degrees, so I put on my robe over my thin nighty and I made the mistake of tying the robe belt only to find that it hits just at the incision line. I realized this fact as soon as I sat and the robe belt tightened, pushing against the incision. That did not feel good at all.

The doctor prescribed an antibiotic this morning. Dave will go soon to Walgreens to pick it up. I maybe might possibly be developing an infection and she just wants to be proactive about things, which I appreciate, even if I hate antibiotics almost as much as I hate most all other medications, even ones that I know are helpful to me (because menopause has meant so many bad reactions and emergent allergies to drugs I took with wild abandon back in my youth, things like antibiotics and Pepto Bismol, wild and crazy things like that). 

Just to assure myself and everyone, this antibiotic  prescription is based on a very slight odor to some of the discharge on the bandages--not a foul odor, just a slightly "warm" odor, which I sometimes get in skin folds if I skip a shower for a day or two. The discharge doesn't smell every time I change the bandage, it comes and goes. My temp is normally 97.6, at the low end of normal, and the highest temp I've recorded in the last three days is 98.4--which is also a normal temp during my period or even during hot flashes when my temp sometimes rises by a degree or so. The incision site is not red or more painful than usual (though it's hard to say it's more or less painful when everything still hurts and I keep leaning on the incision site to get in and out of this maddeningly high hotel bed). I don't feel any more rundown or tired than you would expect from someone who had a fairly major surgery six days ago--and I feel considerably better and more energetic than I did day before yesterday.

I'm not overly worried. (But since I worry about everything, it's hard not to worry about this--and everything else, you know?) I'm trying to worry just enough, the correct amount of worry, but gauging that amount of worry is difficult, even though I've been practicing worrying for decades.

I'll tell about other things then:

In the "ask and you shall receive" category: Dave came back from Trader Joe's the other night with a roast beef in a box.  It's not bad tasting, is fairly low in sodium, and is ready to eat as soon as you open the package. It came at the perfect time, as I was getting sick of pre-cooked chicken and need to keep my protein intake up. It's a bit on the medium rare side, but I popped some in the microwave and had it for my snack (one of them) last night.

Here's an easily skipped paragraph that is meant more for my own bookkeeping than anything: Speaking of keeping my protein intake up--sigh--I'm supposed to be between 100g and 150g or so per day and that amount of protein is...difficult for me. One reason is that I don't eat eggs or have the ability any longer to tolerate much dairy (cheese is okay, milk no way). I have soymilk, chicken, protein bars and cheese as my main sources of protein. I have soymilk (16g for two cups) with oatmeal in the morning (and yesterday I started adding a scoop of collagen powder to it (5g) and sunflower butter (4g), so that's 25g for breakfast. I have a protein bar for a snack (20g), making it 45g. I have cheese for lunch (2 slices, 16g), that's 61g. Then some chicken or beef for dinner (roughly 20g for 3 ounces of either), so that's 81g...then I just kind of tap out. Another protein bar is another 20, so that gets me to 100 g for the day and I also try to drink another cup or two of soymilk during the day to get over 100.

These are the boring details of recovering from surgery, the minutes and concerns of my little life in this cold hotel room. 

More to come. 

 

 

The Shower

I feel like I got hit by a bus, and showering reveals all the bruising and open wounds still happening. I can't look. I stand with my back to the water while Dave does all the important work, washing my back and sides. I can do part of my lower half. We washed my hair in the sink night before last--or was it last night? Codeine has a say in my sense of time (and Dave is out grabbing dinner at Shake Shack). 

After my shower, I got into a clean nighty (I modified three nightgowns with snaps down the front since I can't lift my hands above my head). Then I got back into bed. Dave checked my grafts and put antibiotic ointment on them and replaced the bandages.  

The next morning:

I've been having insane dreams, part period hormones, part codeine. I dreamt of a cross between a horse and a rhinoceros, a creature kept in a small pen in someone's front yard. I dreamt I was in a city, a cross between the city I live in and New York City. I was at someone's party and she and I left the party looking for food maybe and she bought a joint from a stranger on the street and asked if I wanted some.  I did, but as I did, I woke thinking, this is not a good idea. Last night I dreamt about our cat- and housesitter, but the dream started outside our house that wasn't our house, at night, in the snow, her own two cats accompanying me, curious about my actions. The dream ended inside the house, the housesitter friendly but frantically washing dishes while I made toast. 

I'm up now at 6:30 (was up until almost one a.m., up again at 4:30). I woke up Dave to help me out of bed, tried to describe the last dream to him. Then I needed the toilet. Now I'm having a snack (a small slice from a round loaf of sourdough bread, a slice of Swiss cheese, some cucumber, lots of water.  

Then I'll take another pain pill. Everything still hurts. It's slowly feeling better, but it still hurts.  It's been six days since the surgery. If like to start relying less on the Tylenol with codeine and even on the Tylenol, period, but for now it's a necessary evil. 

We had a blue sky yardage yesterday but it was cold out.  It's cold in the room now, truly cold for me, like 64 degrees. But I wake up hot (hormones). 

More to come. 

The Hotel Room

I move from bed to chair to toilet. I take occasional walks from one end of the room to the other. I do foot pumps every hour or so in bed. Dave helps me change the abdominal bandages that collect the drainage under my arms (where the incisions are still the most open). I go from swollen to itchy and back. I take pain meds, alternating 325 mg acetaminophen without codeine and 300 mg acetaminophen with 30 mg codeine. I don't like the way the codeine makes me feel, but it is an effective pain reliever. 

When the swelling gets too bad, I use an ice pack, studiously avoiding the grafted areas. 

I take my vitamins in the morning with my high blood pressure medication. I take some kind of pain killer every four hours or so.

It's drizzling out. Yesterday it actually rained for awhile. 

We open the door to the balcony--Dave props it open with an empty water bottle--and listen to an unhoused man screaming at everything and nothing and we listen to the traffic, the loud, ugly, sustained honking at the worst of rush hour when people are doing the stupidest things around the construction in front of the hotel.

I took a shower last night, the first since surgery. Dave did most of the work. I mostly stood under the shower with my eyes closed and raised my arms very slightly (I'm not allowed to raise them above my head or to lift more than about 10 pounds)  and let the water run down. After, I changed into a clean nightgown and Dave changed the dressings on my skin grafts. I did not wash my hair yet, so it is a greasy mess.  

It's been cloudy the last couple of days and cold for Miami, 68 degrees, then 62, and tomorrow even lower. The natives don't know what to do when it's this cold. They wander by our window in long sleeves and hoodies and beanies, some in big coats.

I can get in bed on my own (though the hotel bed is about three inches too high to make this easy or comfortable) but I need Dave's help to get out of bed. I'm not supposed to use my arms very much and getting out of bed takes more arm use than getting into bed, surprisingly. 

There are two supermarkets within walking distance, the closest a Trader Joe's across the street from the hotel.  Dave brings relatively healthy things to eat from the grocery store and he makes simple meals in our little kitchen. I've eaten a lot of pre-cooked chicken and baby carrots, sourdough bread and Swiss cheese made into half-sandwiches, half baked potatoes with nothing on them, oatmeal mixed with soymilk and sunflower butter, crackers with avocado mash spread on them. I drink a lot of water.

I take Colace to combat the codeine's effects on my guts. It works.

I use my incentive spirometer a couple of times a day and marvel at how easy it is to breathe at sea level and without the encumbrance of the majority of my breasts. 

Of course the day after surgery, I started my period. It's very light--a perimenopause/menopause period--so I don't have to do too much, but it's just the way of the world, isn't it? Murphy's Menstrual Cycle. 

I'm trying to sleep or rest a lot. But laying in bed gets old. I watch and re-watch Pitch Perfect. I watch and re-watch youtube videos. I tried to turn on the TV in our old room the night before surgery and the commercials were too much for me. I turned it off again and haven't gone back to television. 

The abdominal bandages under my arms still collect drainage, the left side more than the right, a lot more. This afternoon I noticed a slight warm smell to the drainage, so I sent an email to the surgeon's office and we'll see when we get a reply. If it gets worse, I'll text or call her number, but for now we're just monitoring the situation.

Gray Kitty's new best friend sends photos and reports almost every day. He curls up next to her for pets, grouses at her to stir up his food when he pushes it to the side of the bowl. I'm glad he is being well taken care of.

Recovery

Surlgery went fine.  I spent the night in the hospital and am now back in our hotel room in recovery mode. I'm a bruised and swollen mess of course, but I'm keeping up with the pain meds and trying to stay hydrated and get lots of rest.  The next hurdle is avoiding infection.

My throat is kind of sore from the ventilator but the anesthesia didn't knock me back so much, thankfully.  Mentally I feel fine except for a few low moments where I've wondered if it was really worth it.