Since my surgery was moved up unexpectedly it meant that a whole lot of stuff needed to be adjusted. I was going to be out of work several days earlier than I’d planned, J needed to reschedule his time-off, and most importantly we needed to find someone to watch Ava on Monday evening since my surgery was now scheduled for later in the day than originally planned. I’m a plan-far-in-advance sort of person so I found all of these changes incredibly stressful, not to mention that my house (or at least the room I was going to be confined to) needed to be spotless so as not to drive me batty, I needed to shop for items needed for the hospital and immediate recovery and, oh by the way, my in-laws would be coming for a short visit (and dinner) on Saturday night, too. Due to that out of work earlier than planned thing I worked until late in the evening on Friday night cutting into my prep time even more.
Most importantly, thanks to a somewhat devious friend who shall not be named, I’d recently gotten hooked on a vampire series clearly designed for an angsty pre-teen and/or a middle aged female audience, watched the first movie, and just HAD to see the second in the series before I was down and out (and therefore unable to get out at all for a while). Thankfully my in-laws are understanding sorts and didn’t mind much when I bailed out on them after dinner on Saturday night and headed out to meet said friend at the movies to drool over were-teenagers with abs to die for. Of course, it didn’t hurt that my absence meant the grandparents had their son and granddaughter all to themselves for a couple of hours (which is a treat, I’m sure, since it doesn’t happen all that often).
Movie Funny #1: I think there were 2 men in the audience that night. One of them was clearly on a date and the other was the long (and loud) suffering spouse who wasn’t about to let his wife forget that the next time was his turn to pick the movie. Movie Funny #2: Hearing all the middle aged women audibly gasp when the clearly jailbait actor takes his shirt off for the first time and then laugh self consciously when they realized what they were doing. Pathetic Movie Fact #1: It’s the first movie I’ve seen in the theater since well before Ava came home over 2 years ago.
So many, many things to do and not enough time.
Not to mention that it’s about this time that the doubts set in. Not about the surgery itself but about the fact that I am now nearly convinced that I will die in surgery and Ava will be left motherless again. (I get like this when I fly, too – every single time.) At this very late date I decide we need a new will (sorry – too late to do that) and want to discuss J’s next wife (and future mother to my child) with him. He, understandably, thinks that I am nuts and refuses to talk about it which makes me threaten to cancel the surgery completely (except by now I’m really looking forward to the 6 weeks off from work).
Oh yeah, and I had to go to the hospital over the weekend so they could rush the labwork through. Once I found my way to some closet they’re renovating but are currently using as a blood-sucking room the hospital vampire swooped in, drained half my blood, and then slapped a hospital ID bracelet on me before telling me I couldn’t take it off until my surgery on Monday. WTH? Now I’m stuck with a hospital bracelet with about 40 tabs noting my blood type and I’m heading out for a night out with my friend – not that we’re all that exciting or looking for action or anything but a hospital ID was not my accessory of choice.
Good times were had by all, despite my stress and paranoia. My mother-in-law came bearing much frozen food in the hopes that J and Ava would not be forced to subsist on canned pasta sauce (the sacrilege), she cooked us dinner (yum, sausages from NY) when she arrived, I got a night out with a cool friend (sans kids) AND I got accosted and robbed by Barnes and Noble on the way out of the mall. (That’s what I told J, anyway, to account for the lighter wallet and large bag of books I brought home.)
More Later…
Let’s see – over the last 10 years or so, I’ve had laparoscopic surgery 4 (I think) times for removal of endometriosis, adhesions, and scar tissue. I’ve also been on birth control pills and other hormonal treatments for most of my adult years – pretty much every type of BCPs along with a couple rounds of Lupron (drug of Satan, I swear) and Synarel (which was wonderful). The purpose of both Lupron and Synarel is to put your body into a chemically induced state of menopause in order to starve the endo and (theoretically) cause it to die off since it’s estrogen that feeds it. The BCPs level your hormones out so while it won’t cure the endo it can at least (theoretically) suppress the growth. The surgeries are, of course, to remove the endo and fix any other problems it has caused.
The funny thing about endo is that it’s not very predictable. Some people can have the worst stage of the disease with no symptoms at all and others can experience the worst pain with only a slight case of endometriosis. It’s graded by stages, with I being the least invasive and IV being the worst. I’ve watched mine progress through the years from a Stage I (diagnosed around age 25) to the worst case of Stage IV that my surgeon from last year had ever seen. Fortunately I’ve been one of the lucky ones for most of my life and have not been sidelined with any major pain or other issues normally associated with endometriosis. That is, until the last couple of years. But honestly, even then it hasn’t been so bad. Mainly a low grade chronic pain that was easily treated with the magical Motrin so often prescribed by the military docs…except it was starting to get to the point that the Motrin wasn’t working so well any longer and the bigger guns had to be pulled out.
At my last lap in April ‘09 the military doctor I’d been seeing for eons (3 surgeries) finally mentioned the “h” word: Hysterectomy. Now you need to understand that I’d previously mentioned, even requested, a hysterectomy in the past but had been shot down over and over again due to the fact that I was so young, didn’t have children, blah blah blah. I found this insulting because they (several military docs) apparently believed that I wasn’t intelligent enough to know my own mind or have any real say in how this disease affecting MY body should be treated. Not to mention that I’ve known my whole life (well, since I was a teenager) that my kid(s) were in China and I never planned nor expected to have biological children. But I wasn’t ready last year because Ava had just turned 2 and I couldn’t fathom how I could handle her while recovering from that surgery. J was traveling quite a bit around this time and it just wasn’t do-able so I shelved the thought for a while.
Because the endo was sooooo bad the last time the doc put me on Synarel, which is a GnRH-a therapy, after surgery. This put me full square into menopause within a week of starting it…and I LOVED it. Very few migraines (compared to my normal 4-6 a month) and it was my first taste of NO pain, which made me realize how obnoxious that low grade, chronic pain really was. Unfortunately you can only take Synarel for 3-6 months as the side effects (bone loss and increased cholesterol amongst others) can be pretty nasty. But that pain free part? Sign me up because I was hooked. I finished the Synarel in August and the endo with associated pain was already coming back by the end of October.
But I was still pretty worried about the surgery itself and, more importantly, the recovery. Remember that toddler and all? So I needed to find the best and easiest way to do this which I already knew wouldn’t involve the military if I could help it. Since I’ve always maintained separate civilian health insurance I did some research, found the best surgeon in the area who utilized the DaVinci robotic assisted method, and made a phone call.
Except I couldn’t even get an appointment with him for nearly a year. I pled my case to the receptionist, who is also a fellow endo sufferer, and she back-doored me into a NP appointment who then referred me to the surgeon, scoring me an appointment in early December. And what a breath of fresh air he was.
I took all my records and formulated my arguments only to discover that I didn’t even really need them. He reviewed my records, did a physical exam, listened to me plead my case, and then agreed that a hysterectomy was certainly indicated based on all that he’d seen and heard from me. I told him that I wanted to do robotic assisted if at all possible (at this point his eyes lit up like a Christmas tree – apparently this is pretty cool to him when he gets to do it) and he simply asked me when I wanted to have it done.
“Mid-January, please.” I replied.
And that was it. I signed the paperwork, agreed on a January 14th surgery date, got my pre-op instructions, and pretty much went on my merry way. This made me happy since I could deal with the holiday stuff, celebrate our anniversary, and then go under the knife (or whatever the robot guy uses – I had a visual of laser beams shooting from his eyes but I’m pretty sure that’s just me being all sci-fi weird) before taking a few weeks to recover. The doc insists you commit to 4-6 weeks off, by the way, but I was convinced I’d be a superstar and would be totally recovered in 2 weeks or so.
All was planned well in advance: J was taking time off, the surgery was scheduled for early AM so we wouldn’t have to worry about finding someone to watch Ava, etc. Extra pajamas were purchased (in a larger size to account for the swelling) and everything was set…until I got the unexpected phone call that surgery was moved up to January 11th instead.
To be continued…
Please note that I’m back dating posts so this isn’t happening now. I’m all better (mostly) and am just now fleshing out my drafts and actually getting them posted. I blame Disney. I haven’t been blogging in the present since we got behind on that trip. Maybe someday I’ll be caught up.
Clearly she has none.
When I asked her what on earth she was doing, she replied “Cleaning my toes, Mama.”
What could I do but laugh? She answered my question, didn’t she?
And then we had a chat about the appropriateness of putting our feet on the table…especially while eating. So far the message seems to have stuck, thank goodness.
We’re big BBQ fans around here but we pretty much mainly roll with the Carolina style – the more vinegar and hot sauce the better. None of this ketchup based stuff for us…with the exception of an occasional Pierce’s pulled pork sandwich and even then I’m usually grouching about how (too) sweet it is. My favorite local BBQ place is a family owned (near-literal) hole in the wall, complete with a plywood counter, where people line up outside to get food. They have to, considering it’s just about big enough for 3 customers inside at a time. It’s also in a not-so-good neighborhood yet you’ll see folks in business suits and driving $$$ German engineered vehicles standing alongside the blue collar and obviously unemployed people while waiting their turn. Yes, it’s that good.
Ava got her first taste of pulled pork and she quite liked it (despite it being store bought) once she got over that first unexpected tang.
She’s such a good eater. Not terribly picky and will try most anything even if it is spicy or heavily seasoned. Except lentils – she still won’t eat those (neither will I) and has literally thrown up every single time she’s ingested some (only twice).
After dinner and a bath, while getting ready for bed, she asked that she be allowed to sleep with Pooh and Mickey and Minnie. We knew this would be logistically impossible but we let her give it a shot.
While she had a blast with them, she ultimately decided on her own that they were space hogs and kicked them out.
But, sweet girl that she is, of course she kissed them goodnight first.
One thing Ava’s daycare does in spades are art projects. She brings home something almost daily, waving it proudly at us as we arrive to pick her up, before abandoning it in favor of the juice she knows we always have ready for the ride home.
So what’s a parent to do with all of this fine craftsmanship? Well, if you’re J then you let it pile up in your truck for a while and then toss it all into the recycle bin without a second thought once it threatens to take over the backseat. If you’re me then you obsessively hoard every single scribble, collage, or piece of glued on macaroni that Ava has (supposedly) created and justify this behavior by the fact that I was traumatized by only having one, yes only one, piece of my childhood artwork saved. My mom gave it to me when she was unloading her basement of all my crap (still haven’t brought those roller skates home yet) and injured me further by asking me why I had so many ‘m’s scribbled all over the sky. *Sigh.* Those were birds. Obviously my interpretation wasn’t clear which could explain that my mother foresaw that I would not be an ‘artiste’ and therefore didn’t bother to preserve my early efforts for posterity.
My dilemma now is what to do with all of this? I have plans. I really do – some involve scrapbooking, some involve scanning and importing into a photobook, and some involve ignoring them and continuing to pile them in the basket beside my desk…which is now overflowing. Clearly the third option is the one most likely to happen.
Ava spotted the basket, which wasn’t hard to do since it spilled over onto the floor and into her play area, and she was delighted to find a hat that she’d made a couple of months ago for Thanksgiving week. I suspect that she had a fair bit of assistance with this one since the feathers were pointing (sorta) in the right direction and they weren’t glued directly to her head.
At least this was one item that I could toss into the recycle bin with no regret since she wore it for ages and pretty much trashed it in the process.
One down, lots and lots and lots more to go…