Post-op thoughts

And so here I sit/slump/lie, mildly drugged, with several holes in my abdomen.

I’ve been out of hospital for a couple of days now and I’m making my way along the road to recovery. The op went well and I’m under doctor’s orders to take it easy. As he said, I can eat what I want, drink what I want and do what I want, but if he sees me before the scheduled follow-up appointment, then he’ll know that I have no common sense.
“The operation may be routine,” he told me when I first saw him, “but it should not be underestimated.”
A bit like life really. But he was right. While I was in and out of theatre within the prescribed 90 minutes, things went badly wrong for the patient across the ward from me – a nice older gent who had been doing the Cape Times crossword with his wife before I went in – who was having the same op with the same surgeon immediately after me.  He ended up in the High Care unit after 3 (4?) hours of surgery and had to go back under the knife the following day to attempt to rectify matters. I’m sad to say that I have no idea how things went. I’ll make a point to ask when I see the doc again.

Immediately after coming out of theatre, I was plied with morphine. I have a vague recollection of the nurse asking me if I was in pain. I was. She slipped some morphine into me and asked again. I seem to remember telling her that yes, it still hurt and she gave me some more. Things were going quite nicely at this point, and it seemed that I had quickly worked out an excellent system for legally obtaining copious amounts of opiates by just giving an affirmative single word answer. However, it rapidly fell apart when I missed her next question as I was too busy watching the huge gerbils chasing each other excitedly around the walls of the ward.

Sadly(?) I’m not on anything quite so strong now and my bedroom is a gerbil-free zone. But everything is still a bit fuzzy and though I have proof-read this post about 74 times already, I keep finding errors and those are the errors that I have found. Apologies for any that I have missed.

And so this is me for the moment, still a bit slow and a bit sore, having now learnt that you use your abdominal muscles for absolutely everything you do. Breathing, laughing, coughing, walking, any sort of movement whatsoever, sit-ups (OK, I knew that one already), dancing, abseiling… absolutely everything. I have tried to cut down on my painkillers already, but it’s not an option yet, and now my wife has asked me to do the shopping (online – no driving for 10 days).
It could yield some interesting  – but I hope at least entertaining – results.

I’ll let you know.