What a wild fourteen days it has been. The last that you heard from me, we had scheduled our surgery date and were working to make sure everything was in order before the big day.  Well, that day has come and passed and thanks to Ashley’s post, you know that the surgery was a rocky one but ultimately successful. What I would like to do today, is give you an idea of what recovery has been like.  

Hospital Days (Aug. 8th - Aug. 13th) 

What a blur. The time in the hospital felt like one long day. A new nurse and nurse’s assistant every eight to twelve hours, vitals every four hours, and pills to take a various times of the day/night made it difficult for me to get into a rhythm. Of course, it didn’t help that I was also on Dilaudid, an opioid pain medication made from Morphine, the entire time.  I’m glad to say that I was able to stop taking this stuff after only a day or two of being home. 

As I am sure you can imagine, I was in a fair amount of pain from the procedure. The morning after surgery my anesthesiologist stopped by and asked if I remembered the recovery room at all.  I said “No” and he said “That’s probably a good thing. You were in a lot of pain”.  After all, they essentially cut my belly open all the way, mixed up my insides, took some stuff out, and stapled me closed.  Now it looks like I have a zipper running from my pelvic bone, around my belly button, and up to the bottom of my rib cage. 

The doctors wanted me to stay in the hospital until they were confident that my digestive system was functioning. This is because they had to move my intestines around so much in order to get to the lymph nodes, and they had to do structural repairs on my ureter (carries urine from the kidneys to the bladder).  Unfortunately, neither of the effected functions came back easily but they ultimately started showing signs of life by the end of our stay.  Not being able to urinate may be one of the worst things I’ve ever experienced.  There was one 24 hour period where I was catheterized three separate times.  It sucked.

As we were working through my sluggish digestive system, my blood counts were not bouncing back in the way that our doctor would have liked.  I lost so much blood during surgery that my body was having a hard time building my red counts back up quickly enough. So, they decided to give me a blood transfusion on Sunday.  That seemed to do the trick.  My body responded to the transfusion in a way that they liked and a subsequent blood test that we submitted after we returned home was completely normal. Phew!

Home (Aug 13th - Present) 

Then, the next afternoon, we went home!  Just in case you are curious, there are about one billion crater sized pot holes in the road on the 90-minute drive from Iowa City and Dubuque. Ashley did a great job avoiding most of them, but there is only so much one person can do.  

Once home, Leo (our Irishdoodle) promptly started ignoring me. He did the same thing during chemotherapy.  I assume he and I will need to wrestle and bark at each other so I can re-establish myself as the Alpha once I’m feeling better. I’ll have to start working on my plan. 

All things considered, the recovery is going well. I’m miles ahead of where I was when we first arrived home. Right now my biggest physical challenge is showering. It takes an enormous amount of focus and strategy to get in and out of the shower as quickly as possible. It is exhausting.  

We are also following a super low fat diet that is meant to slowly reintroduce fat into my system. This is important because there was damage to my lymphatic system during surgery, so if fat is reintroduced too quickly, my abdomen could fill up with fluid that my body isn’t able to absorb. For the first 7 days after surgery I was limited to less than 5 grams of fat each day.  We are in week two now and my limit is 10 grams of fat each day. Next week will be 20 grams per day and the fourth week will be 40 grams each day. This ramp up allows the lymphatic system to heal and ease back in to normal function.  

I have to say that the combination of our CSA vegetable boxes and Ashley’s ingenuity have made this new diet really quite fun. We’ve been eating a lot of fruits and fresh vegetables, and it has been great. In fact, this week (week 2) has been a little challenging in that there have been several days that I haven’t been able to make it to my 10 gram limit because we have so many good veggies to eat.

Building my stamina for walking around and pretty much any physical activity is where my focus is shifting to now that we are a couple of weeks out from surgery. I’m finding this to be pretty challenging at the moment. The pain from the incision is minimal at this point, but it is still uncomfortable enough to stand up straight that it has been a deterrent.  I’ll press on, but I am hopeful that I’ll be able to get through this wall sooner rather than later. I know my body is still recovering, and it will take time, but it is difficult to be patient.  

Coming Up Next: 

My staples are being removed this week!  They’ll take the staples out and apply Steri-strips to make sure everything remains closed.

My next post is coming very soon, and it will contain the results that we received from the pathologists after they analyzed the mass that was removed. I feel like it needs its own post.