Would you believe I got NO flowers after my surgery? I got plenty of get well wishes and even a few get well gifts but not even one bouquet of flowers – which actually would have been nice seeing that I was pretty much confined to one part of my house for a long while. Apparently I protested too well to folks: “No, no – don’t spend your money on me” and “Flowers just die in a couple of days anyway,” I said. Hmmph, won’t do that again.
The get well gifts were very thoughtful. Spa sets, a cheese basket (still puzzling over this one a bit but I LOVE the basket it came in – it was repurposed right away to hold Ava’s hairbows), and even a snack bouquet.
The snack bouquet was very cute but I think J enjoyed it even more than I did. I had to near fight him for the KitKat bar and he somehow managed to snag the oreos when I wasn’t looking. Although, in all seriousness, food wasn’t even the slightest bit interesting or appetizing at this point anyway (except for KitKat bars). I love the snack bouquet idea though and will definitely use this in the future. It looks pretty easy to make – sticks glued on to the backs of the packages and stuck into florist foam with a little bit of green cellophane arranged to look like grass.
But the best gift?
My visits with this little thing (especially once she decided she liked me again):
That’s the best medicine on Earth.
So how did Ava do?
Well, that depends on how you look at it, I guess.
D-Day itself was fine. Despite our rocky start at daycare drop off (which is sadly not unusual when I take her) she was fine. She spent the evening with her friend, Izzy, and J had her home and in bed not too long past her normal bedtime. Thanks to an occasional business trip here and there she actually doesn’t freak out anymore when I’m gone for a day or two so it wasn’t a big deal when she didn’t see me that night or even the next morning.
We maintained her daycare routine in order to keep things as normal as possible – J dropped her off in the AM and picked her up at the regular time. Once she got home J would bring her into the room where I was camped out several times a day so she could at least see me but he suddenly became the sole provider of hugs, food, kisses, cups of milks, baths, books, and all the other things we both normally handle. I was either too out of it or too sore to do much for the first 3 days but she was always thrilled to see me when J brought her in for a while.
By the 4th day I was feeling a little better so I asked J to pile some pillows around me to make sure I didn’t get toddler tackled in the belly and to leave her with me for a little while so we could bond over some Sesa.me Street. She was thrilled to be able to lay in mama’s bed and watch TV since this is a rare treat for her. Thrilled, that is, until J left the room and all hell broke loose because she did not want a) J to leave and/or b) to be alone with me.
My heart sustained some permanent damage, I’m certain of it. She screamed so loud that J came running back upstairs to see what the problem was. I had him comfort her for a minute and then told him he had to leave so we could sort this out. She yelled some more, wept quietly once she figured out J wasn’t coming to save her, refused to let me touch or soothe her, and scooted as far away from me as she possibly could without falling off the bed. I tried really hard not to take any of this personally but this was the first time she’d flat out rejected me and it smarted a bit. Of course, I also had to worry that this might resurrect any latent abandonment issues and have a negative impact on all the work we’ve done to ensure that she develops a secure and confident attachment. While I think her attachment has been fantastic, there’s a tendency toward anxiety in her that I need to keep an eye on and manage and it scared me to death to see her reaction when J left the room. She was in anxiety overload and was struggling so very hard to control this situation.
Thank goodness for Elm.o, Steve Jobs, and whoever invented YouTube. Between the temptation of that little red monster and my web enabled cell phone I was able to coax her back over to my side of the bed and to forget for a little bit that Daddy left her to the evil, disappearing mama. A few more rounds of the lipdub version of “I Gotta Feeling” and she was putty in my hands.
Actually saying that I was putty in her hands would be way more accurate. I would have done almost anything to be back in her good graces even if it does involve annoying puppets and the Black Eyed Peas.
Sadly, I hear that the Candlelight Wedding Chapel is no longer in existence. Torn down, I’m sure, for yet another mega Vegas hotel.
However…we’ve managed to hang on, by the skin of our teeth sometimes to be sure, and hope to be going strong for another 14 (or 40) years.
My angel nurse was pretty good company through that long first night that I was stuck in the hospital. I would have slept except she wouldn’t let me so instead I surfed the internet on my phone, watched endless informercials since I couldn’t turn the stupid TV off (and I felt bad asking her to do it), and had several conversations with her, one of which was debating the merits of Tempurpedic (I’m a fan and was really missing mine that night). She finally dragged me out of bed around 5AM after we negotiated an agreement that I would get up if she called my doctor’s resident and got her to a)write my discharge orders and b)remove the catheter.
Resident doctor came right away and agreed that I could leave soon but the order somehow didn’t get communicated to day nurse, henceforth to be known as Satan Nurse or SN for short.
SN clearly thought very highly of herself and her importance. I did not and she failed to understand that I was irritable and in pain since her method of administering pain medication was primarily to ignore me when I pushed the nurse call button. Seriously, she told me once that she was too busy. SN also decided to tell me that I would not be leaving until much later in the afternoon. Ummm, no. She sorted that out rather quickly after I set her straight. Convenient being on drugs, by the way. You can get by with a lot of bad behavior by using that excuse.
She did win one battle by making me attempt to eat breakfast although I did request a preemptive shot of anti-nausea meds first. The breakfast itself was rather horrid and I tried to talk J into eating some of it when he got there. He opted out. So did I.
I won the next skirmish by refusing to have my IV out until I got one last dose of the good stuff medicine before leaving and getting into a bouncy car for the ride home.
To make a long story short (I know – y’all are sighing with relief): J busted me out of there, brought me home,managed to get me upstairs, and put me to bed. At some point he went and filled all my prescriptions and proceeded to keep me drugged up and sleeping. Good thing J planned the entire week off to play nursemaid to me, Mr. Mom to Ava, and zookeeper to the menagerie.
Although I am a very easy sick person to take care of, if I do say so myself. Just toss me some crackers and grape kool-aid in every so often and I’m happy.
The pain level at home wasn’t too bad but narcotics were definitely needed for several days. I also developed an immediate and intense longing for a full length body pillow and J kindly made an emergency trip out to procure one.
And Ava’s reaction to all this? Well, that’s a whole ‘nother post.
Y’all know the drill. No food or water after midnight (I ate a gigantic peanut butter sandwich at 11:55PM and downed a couple of big glasses of water), no lotion or makeup, remove all nail polish and piercings, and so on. All regulations were complied with, bags were packed, and we were on our way by 10AM to drop Ava at daycare in order to be at the hospital by 10:30AM for a surgery time of 1PM. Ava was totally feeling the stress vibe and I was on the verge of tears so J ripped her out of my arms (almost literally) and took her in – with her little arms outstretched and reaching for me while I got all weepy in the car. We made it to the hospital just barely on time only to discover that I’d left my ID at home. Fortunately the check in nurse didn’t care since they had one on file and she said nobody in their right mind would try to scam their way in to undergo major surgery anyway.
We waited for ages in the waiting room and again in the tiny cubby they stuff you into to wait to be carted back to surgery. Apparently they weren’t too worried about HIPAA violations back there ’cause I could tell you far too much information about the gentleman who was in the cubby next to mine – name, age, diagnosis, blood type, surgery, address, and more. I was there so long that J was getting ready to find someone since they’d obviously forgotten about me when my anesthesiologist showed up cracking bad jokes (something about him never having anyone wake up dead and then chortling like he didn’t tell this same joke to every single patient he has) and with an explanation that the surgery prior to mine ran longer than expected. I got the ‘these are all the things that can go wrong’ speech from both him and my surgeon but by this time I’m contemplating gnawing on the IV bag for nourishment since I was now at 14 hours and counting from last food or liquid consumption and I would have agreed to anything so they would stop talking and get started. Bad joke doc gave me drugs (which made me appreciate his jokes much more) and I happily waved J off to go nosh on some hospital food while I went under the fancy robot knives – albeit with an understanding that if the endo was too bad then they may have to do a regular abdominal hysterectomy. The surgery was estimated to take about 3 hours.
He did it in 2. Everything went so much smoother than he’d anticipated and he said I was a perfect candidate for the DaVinci assisted since it allowed him a magnified view of all the endo that was in there. He removed a large band of scar tissue, a number of adhesions (some of which had stuck my colon to the abdominal wall), and excised a ton of endo after he’d removed the uterus – most of this was found in the harder to reach places near the bladder which makes sense considering I’d just had surgery in April. He also removed my problematic right ovary but left the other one since it appeared to be unaffected and he knew how strongly I felt about keeping it if there was any way possible in order to avoid hormone replacement therapy. Oh yeah, and the cervix too. I couldn’t see any reason to keep it and after my (unfounded) scare last year with a questionable pap test I had no qualms about letting that go, too. Recovery room was a breeze once they brought me some ice chips and a couple of those super warm blankets and I was carted off to my room soon thereafter.
I had a private room (thank heavens) and I think J was already in there when I arrived. Or maybe not. What can I say? I was higher than a kite so my recall is a little foggy. I do know he had to track down my bag o’ stuff that had gone missing and he had the foresight to ferret me out some ginger ale before heading out to pick Ava up and take her to our friends’ house for the evening so he could come back and make sure I was good and settled for the night. Ava did fine with our friends – making a new best friend of their teenage daughter. Even though Ava is in daycare for about 6 hours a day we almost never leave her any other time so I was worried about this. For no reason, apparently.
J came back (with crackers – YAY!) and hung out for a couple of hours, most of which we spent celebrating the fact that I was alive by trying to figure out how to turn off the TV with the provided remote. I was convinced it was me (that drug thing again) but neither he or the evening nurse could make it work either. No matter, I had my iPhone with music, books, and J brought my netbook in case I felt like blog reading and commenting under the influence – which I would have except they had a net nanny type of program on their wireless and I couldn’t access anything I normally read…including my own. Who knew I was classed under objectionable content?
Other than the typical annoyances associated with a hospital stay (you know, where the nurse comes into the room 5 seconds after you finally fall asleep to wake you for a blood pressure or something) it wasn’t a bad experience. The (very good) pain medication was free flowing so pain never went above a 6-7 on the pain scale and my night nurse was an absolute angel except when she let my IV bag run dry and the alarms went off scaring the heck out of me. Seriously – an angel. It amazes me how much nurses do, all the while maintaining a pleasant and positive attitude, with so little recognition.
Still more later…