I'm here, hallelujah
My surgery was Wednesday, December 8th, and IT WORKED. The kind anesthesiologist (who, despite his bedside/Zoomside manner which was a billion times better than the arrogant annoying surgeon's, told me he'd only ever assisted at two other surgeries using Trendelenburg with someone approximating my size, and neither had worked... at least Dr. Han told me there was about an 85% chance it might work, though she knew it was less for my "body habitus" (ewwww). Kaiser newspeak for both obesity and BMI, I presume)-- anyway, Dr. Foster SUCCEEDED and I have raised his success rate to 33%. I think. I am crap at math.
So Dr. Han pulled out my uterus, ovaries, and cervix, and lacerated my lady parts quite a bit in so doing with her DaVinci robot -- actually, I suppose the lacerations were manual, at the vagina end of things in this laparascopic deal, and not inflicted by her. I didn't ask). They hurt. I hurt. I hurt a fucking lot, though the oxycodone I took half an hour ago is starting to kick in, thank fuck.
I had to stay in the hospital Wednesday night, Thursday night, and Friday night, and my sister took me home yesterday. The surgical team (I have to say, whatever my critique of Han, she is a fucking hard worker -- she did THREE operations on Thursday) (that seems nuts to me; mine took six hours) came by and said that my healing from surgery was EXCELLENT; I was only being kept in for blood sugar and creatinine reasons. You know what those reasons were? They refused to give me either my usual humulin insulin u OR my usual (pretty high) dose... not a dose I fucking MADE UP, mind you, but one that Kaiser pharmacy docs arrived at... so unsurprisingly my sugars were really high and didn't seem to be going down. I told them this fact about five times, but it took them three days to contact my pharmacy doctor for her input.
I've never been in a hospital before. I'm sure this is not a hot take, but oh, the pricking and poking and multiple IVs and shoving of things like pepcid and morphine through IVs! OUCH. I had my vitals taken every hour on the hour for the first two and a half days... I was moved twice, just shoving the bed down corridors. The second time it was just two doors down and I was like, "uh, why?" And the attendant (not a nurse; I think he wasn't actually supposed to tell me) said -- oh, well, we share this corridor with Covid cases, and we needed the room close to them. Nice! I wasn't thinking about that. Until then.
On the plus side? It was... kind of nice to make zero decisions about anything. The food was disgusting (except for some lentil soup which was sort of slimy but good, and some roasted vegetables, which were AMAZING). But I didn't have to do ANYTHING to make it appear on a table in front of me. And they give you the illusion of choice by taking your 'order' for a rotating slew of items that were more or less the same each day. I hate dietetic shit, though. Fake butter, sugar free yogurt, sugar free pudding, UGH.
PT people are so nice, in my limited experience. They are encouraging and cheerleading enough that the two Desirees I dealt with were IMPRESSED with my muscular POWER. Ha. On the other hand, I actually am getting up off my bed and back on it -- my normal, quite high mattress -- by myself with the help of a walker and despite my stupid frozen shoulder. My sister took me home and stayed last night and will stay today, and I only bugged her once in the middle of the night because the knee elevator wedge thing was not working; just painful. I probably could have done without the head raising wedge, too -- I'll try just two pillows tonight. There's $120 down the drain! Oh, which I have to pay RQ back for. This morning at 6 AM, I was out of my bed and in the bathroom in a damn flash despite the walker. I was impressed with MYSELF.
I will hear the results of the pathology and the plans for my (I ... THINK external only, now) radiation treatment once I've healed from the surgery on the 14th... Tuesday? Yes, Tuesday.
One step at a motherfucking time.
In other news: my father and stepmother will be arriving on December 20th, staying with me. Apparently my dad called Rachel more than once on surgery day, anxious as fuck. He does not initiate phone calls to her, ever, and to me, rarely. He likes everything to be a test of love, poor needy child that he has never ceased to be. We should call HIM (and I do; I am very dutiful).
And the news on Alistair is "trending positive" -- that's how Geof put it. His doctors have raised his survival chances, and put off his heart surgery until this coming Wednesday, and in the meantime he is a bit more awake, though still not in a place where they can really judge what the earlier brain bleeds etc. did. I was so fucking relieved to read that when I came home yesterday. I wasn't on FB at all from Wednesday until yesterday afternoon.
Rachel has no one in her household who will watch Star Trek (any of its interations, though she doesn't like TOS much) so I am obliging by rewatching Discovery. We're four episodes in, but I don't know how far we'll get because since everything was delayed, the days off she took were all while I was in the stupid hospital, rather than at home with me post-op, and she's got work tomorrow, as a principal in a school where the sub was a retired principal who barged into everyone's room and took notes on everyone and antagonized everyone and referred to the "good" (and "very white") school she'd been principal at in the Oakland Hills, AND asked a little selectively mute boy who wouldn't talk to her during library time if he was "normal" or "Special Ed". When he didn't answer, she repeated the question to a parent volunteer! Special extra greatness to this bunch of bullshit -- the retired substitute principal in question was MY principal back at Lowell (demographics: 85% Black, 12% Latinx, 3% anything else -- Asian, really... I had two white students in seven years there) in Oakland around... 2003? Ha. She knew she (a white lady) was the wrong principal for the school, so back then she had a little bit of self awareness. And she liked me a lot, which looks sort of worrisome in retrospect, huh?
So Dr. Han pulled out my uterus, ovaries, and cervix, and lacerated my lady parts quite a bit in so doing with her DaVinci robot -- actually, I suppose the lacerations were manual, at the vagina end of things in this laparascopic deal, and not inflicted by her. I didn't ask). They hurt. I hurt. I hurt a fucking lot, though the oxycodone I took half an hour ago is starting to kick in, thank fuck.
I had to stay in the hospital Wednesday night, Thursday night, and Friday night, and my sister took me home yesterday. The surgical team (I have to say, whatever my critique of Han, she is a fucking hard worker -- she did THREE operations on Thursday) (that seems nuts to me; mine took six hours) came by and said that my healing from surgery was EXCELLENT; I was only being kept in for blood sugar and creatinine reasons. You know what those reasons were? They refused to give me either my usual humulin insulin u OR my usual (pretty high) dose... not a dose I fucking MADE UP, mind you, but one that Kaiser pharmacy docs arrived at... so unsurprisingly my sugars were really high and didn't seem to be going down. I told them this fact about five times, but it took them three days to contact my pharmacy doctor for her input.
I've never been in a hospital before. I'm sure this is not a hot take, but oh, the pricking and poking and multiple IVs and shoving of things like pepcid and morphine through IVs! OUCH. I had my vitals taken every hour on the hour for the first two and a half days... I was moved twice, just shoving the bed down corridors. The second time it was just two doors down and I was like, "uh, why?" And the attendant (not a nurse; I think he wasn't actually supposed to tell me) said -- oh, well, we share this corridor with Covid cases, and we needed the room close to them. Nice! I wasn't thinking about that. Until then.
On the plus side? It was... kind of nice to make zero decisions about anything. The food was disgusting (except for some lentil soup which was sort of slimy but good, and some roasted vegetables, which were AMAZING). But I didn't have to do ANYTHING to make it appear on a table in front of me. And they give you the illusion of choice by taking your 'order' for a rotating slew of items that were more or less the same each day. I hate dietetic shit, though. Fake butter, sugar free yogurt, sugar free pudding, UGH.
PT people are so nice, in my limited experience. They are encouraging and cheerleading enough that the two Desirees I dealt with were IMPRESSED with my muscular POWER. Ha. On the other hand, I actually am getting up off my bed and back on it -- my normal, quite high mattress -- by myself with the help of a walker and despite my stupid frozen shoulder. My sister took me home and stayed last night and will stay today, and I only bugged her once in the middle of the night because the knee elevator wedge thing was not working; just painful. I probably could have done without the head raising wedge, too -- I'll try just two pillows tonight. There's $120 down the drain! Oh, which I have to pay RQ back for. This morning at 6 AM, I was out of my bed and in the bathroom in a damn flash despite the walker. I was impressed with MYSELF.
I will hear the results of the pathology and the plans for my (I ... THINK external only, now) radiation treatment once I've healed from the surgery on the 14th... Tuesday? Yes, Tuesday.
One step at a motherfucking time.
In other news: my father and stepmother will be arriving on December 20th, staying with me. Apparently my dad called Rachel more than once on surgery day, anxious as fuck. He does not initiate phone calls to her, ever, and to me, rarely. He likes everything to be a test of love, poor needy child that he has never ceased to be. We should call HIM (and I do; I am very dutiful).
And the news on Alistair is "trending positive" -- that's how Geof put it. His doctors have raised his survival chances, and put off his heart surgery until this coming Wednesday, and in the meantime he is a bit more awake, though still not in a place where they can really judge what the earlier brain bleeds etc. did. I was so fucking relieved to read that when I came home yesterday. I wasn't on FB at all from Wednesday until yesterday afternoon.
Rachel has no one in her household who will watch Star Trek (any of its interations, though she doesn't like TOS much) so I am obliging by rewatching Discovery. We're four episodes in, but I don't know how far we'll get because since everything was delayed, the days off she took were all while I was in the stupid hospital, rather than at home with me post-op, and she's got work tomorrow, as a principal in a school where the sub was a retired principal who barged into everyone's room and took notes on everyone and antagonized everyone and referred to the "good" (and "very white") school she'd been principal at in the Oakland Hills, AND asked a little selectively mute boy who wouldn't talk to her during library time if he was "normal" or "Special Ed". When he didn't answer, she repeated the question to a parent volunteer! Special extra greatness to this bunch of bullshit -- the retired substitute principal in question was MY principal back at Lowell (demographics: 85% Black, 12% Latinx, 3% anything else -- Asian, really... I had two white students in seven years there) in Oakland around... 2003? Ha. She knew she (a white lady) was the wrong principal for the school, so back then she had a little bit of self awareness. And she liked me a lot, which looks sort of worrisome in retrospect, huh?