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.