The recovery

We’re post-op day 2 so far and the word of the day is ouch. I don’t know that I went into detail about the surgery I was having, I mean I’ve been out of it these past couple of days since the surgery. It was a spinal cord surgery, there was some scar tissue that was giving me some trouble and they went in bilaterally (both sides of the spine) to remove it. That was… fun.

They made incisions about the iliac crest, the top part of the hip, and of course on the backside. So I have two, ten-ish centimeter incision sites on either side of the spine at that level. Right now it honestly looks like they shoved two golf balls inside the incisions before they stitched me back up.

Needless to say it hurts, it hurts to lay down, it hurts to move, it hurts to not move. It doesn’t feel great for sure. The worst part is I don’t get pain meds. Technically that’s not true, it’s just that none of the medicines they give me work. Like no pain relief at all, instead they just make me nauseous and dizzy. I guess if I were distracted with wanting to vomit every 5 minutes then I wouldn’t have time to focus on the pain, but I think I’ll pass anyway.

I’ve been sleeping… a lot. I’m finding it hard to stay awake and that may be because I’m not sleeping well at night or maybe the after effects from the surgery, or it could just be the pain keeping me from getting a good sleep. In any case, I can’t find relief in sleep so I’m stuck toughing it out.

Believe it or not though, this isn’t as bad as the last surgery, that one sucked so bad. Mostly because I couldn’t breathe through my nose (the surgery was a septoplasty to repair my deviated septum). This time though it hurts to move and while I got plenty of time off after the last surgery, today I have an experiment that I need to tend to so I got a days worth of recovery. Today is the only experiment I’ll have for the next few days so that will be nice at least.

In any case, that’s the update. Surgery sucks, but the pain prior to the surgery was worse. Now I’m dealing with post surgery pain, which is a whole different type of pain. Even though I would prefer to be pain free right now, I’m glad I had the surgery finally. Now if I could just fast forward to the part where I’m healed and can tell if the surgery fixed the problem or not, I would be happy.

Well time to get ready for my experiment. Apologies if this post doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, I did just have surgery after all.