Last night I finally got a good night’s sleep and all day today all I want to do is go back to sleep.  Sometimes I feel great  and other times I’m uncomfortable.  I never really expected that recovering would be as hard as it is.

I guess I should give a mini-version of surgery and hospital stay.  I went to the University of WA Medical Center for surgery on January 10, 2012.  The surgery was scheduled for 8 hours.  I had a DIEP flap reconstruction.  This involves removing tissue from my stomach, removing the tissue expander which saved my own skin, and taking blood vessels and a flap of skin to recreate what was removed.  I was put directly into ICU because the flap needs to be checked every hour, and believe me, they checked it every hour.  The next morning they discovered I was losing a lot of blood…as a matter of fact, I was on my 2nd unit of blood and I was losing it as fast as it was going in.  Dr. Louie said I hadn’t had excessive bleeding at all but at times they don’t really find the cause, he could just spray something on the area to make it stop.  He was so sweet about it, assured me the flap was not in danger and I wasn’t in danger.  They had to call Kenny because he’d spent the night at a friends’.  This surgery took an hour and all was well.

I stayed in ICU from Tues. until Thurs.  At that point I was released to my own room.  I’m sure as far a surgeries go, it was uneventful.  Just learning to get out of bed, standing up without pulling on my ab muscles.  I cannot use my right arm much at all for months to come, can’t lift anything more than 5 lbs. and this includes using my arm to push off, too.  I did lots of hall walking and lots of time sitting as well as sleeping.   I learned to walk up and down steps, so much fun.  As things began to progress, they started talking about letting me go.  Dr. Louie had to go out of town to a conference and he suggested Sun.  His team asked me Sat. if I was ready and it scared me, no I wasn’t ready.  Sunday I was.

Amazingly we had started getting snow and it felt like a blizzard when we left the hospital.  For a few miles it was white everywhere and then we started hitting bare pavement.  The trip home was uneventful other than the fact we couldn’t figure out how to get my pants on over the drain tubes so the nurse had rolled my waistband down and it laid on the incision the whole time home which was very very uncomfortable.

When we got home, I was surprised how stiff I was and how hard it was to get me out of the car since I can’t  use my arms to pull myself up either.  Trying to walk when I felt so stiff and had the pants rolled was not fun at all, I was in tears by the time I hit the porch.  We didn’t have any idea what I could but I found a dress in my drawer that was easy to get oner my head so that’s what I wore the first 24 hours home.  We did figure out that we could pull my waistband out and put it up over the drains because the tubing is quite long.  Believe me, though, it is very strange to have them all (3) jangling around, There’s virtually no way to hide them.

The first two nights were miserable.  I am fortunate to have a wedge from my friend, Linda, but I hurt when I laid on my back for too long and the only other option other than trying to change the angle that I was laying was to sit up on the chair straight up with nowhere to put my head.  If I slid the least bit, it was impossible to get myself off the chair.  Laying on the bed is completely impossible at this point to get off of.

Rhianna and I were wondering about getting a lift chair so she put out the word on Facebook and  within minutes her mother-in-law texted her to say her mother had one.  We had it here that night, right ahead of the pending snow storm that has now kept us paralyzed for days.  I am now independent!!!!

I’ve spent the last few days resting as much as I can.  I also have to get up and walk around but other than that, that’s all I do,  Kenny’s been able to work a little bit.  It was weird to have the city become stuck in all the weather at the same time I came home to recover.  He wouldn’t have been able to work several of those days anyway.

That’s the week in a nutshell so to speak.  I’ll be back soon with a life update.  I’m ready to think about other things!