Well I survived my second operation too - abdominal myomectomy. The great news is it was all routine. I managed to keep the vital bits so can still have children should I want to and didn't need any blood transfusion. There's always something you don't expect though like being a little lop sided now without my (quote gynaecologist) "little friend" inside me anymore. He wasn't that little and certainly became unfriendly but he's gone now, with only a photo to prove it which won't be going on the mantelpiece. The other unexpected thing was the amount of work to be done each day to retrain your muscles as they heal so that they heal functionally. What nothing can prepare you for is the pain of sneezing - imagine holding out your hand and having it thumped with a sledge hammer.
Laughing is also not good. Jim brought over 4GB of music videos to entertain me through convalescence and I was in stitches (pardon the pun) at the MTV presenter introducing 'Lady Marmalade' from the film "Moulin Rouge which took us back to a time where the whore houses were about the music." It's the sort of pain that reels through you afterwards that makes you know you are ALIVE in a strange way.
I tire easily – just a 15 minute walk and I want to have a 3 hour kip. Most frustrating is my memory loss which is common after anaesthetic. I was showing photos of the recent Berlin Conference and could not remember some of the names of my colleagues. Bloody hell - what will I be like with the details of my projects and billion n 1 things that happen in the team I run. Good job they know what they are doing.
Princess Margaret Hospital in Windsor was very nice although the nurses, except the wonderful Spanish one, were not half as warm and friendly as those I’d had in the Royal Brompton. One was positively horrid when I called for a nurse in the middle of a night she came asking abruptly “And what’s wrong with you?” – well I’d just vomited as a reaction to the morphine, bad enough that you are straining your abdomen when you are not supposed to laugh but coupled with the fact I cannot move to lift myself up to be in a more comfortable position or away from myself so nearly choked. It really wasn’t what I needed.
Morphine also made me itch like crazy. They wanted to give me anti-nausea pills but they have their own side effects so I resolved to just wait it out of my system. Once I knew it was the morphine I refused all pain killers and preferred to deal with the pain myself, which apart from changing position, was just like a crippling day of period pain so not that bad. Dealing with pain stops you having energy to care about the aircraft noise outside (on flightpath to Heathrow airport). I do miss my multi level hospital bed though as that made it easier to get in and out of bed. Right now I have ropes tied to the end of the bed when I need to pull myself up.
I had lots of visitors which was fantastic. Bruce, Armen and Oksana popped in on their way to Ronnie Scott's Friday night. William and a very pregnant Esthea were there too. Bruce who is more obsessive about his blog took photos (censored) and wrote up at http://entropy.blogs.com/ "en route to Ronnie's we stopped off to see Marta in hospital, where she is making an impossibly swift recovery from her operation, laughing and joking, bemoaning the lack of wi-fi in what is after all a luxury private hospital, and generally behaving in a manner inappropriate to someone who's only a few hours out of surgery. I think they'll throw her out entirely by tomorrow. Hooray!"
And they did throw me out Saturday too. Saturday I actually felt awful like I had flu symptoms but still decided to put on the happy face, climb the stairs with the physio and get to my own home/bed. And no Sam, while in the hospital the sheets did not move so that I had a cheek glued to the plastic mattress.
BTW my biological mom was the warfare from stressful car journeys but mainly sitting in the overtaking lane as the world overtook us on the left, to making me evacuate my hospital room for an hour due to perfume overuse, to turning up over 2 hours late when I was starving and hypoglycemic waiting for her to help me eat breakfast and saying "great, you left breakfast for me!" as she tucked into it, to totally ignoring our telcon on me needing more help when out of hospital and booking the wrong holiday dates then offering to get me some strange Polish woman to be my nurse, to chasing Drs in the stairwell, to adjusting the table so it fell on my wound, to knocking every glass and bottle over at least once, to hiding things in my house from me and potential intruders (including the whip – a present when I left one job – that I had hanging on my bedroom door for show), to turning down the heating so much at home I returned to an ice box and was a shivering convulsing heap on the sofa under 5 blankets, to buying a new dress from the Jaegar sale to help HER cope with the stress of the operation. Saturday was the first day she got the hang of it and there was her 'care' without my 'fear'.
Dad was also funny – he rang Sunday to ask how I was. I managed to get out 6 words which really didn’t answer the question and he moaned for 20 minutes about how awful his health was. My family are barking. Mark, my 6 year older brother with a mental age of 11, would probably have been more sympathetic. He gave me a teddy he won in Brighton a few days earlier which was a pink pig with patches stitched on its stomach!
My wonderful friends have been a great help since mum left, keeping an eye on me, helping me with lifting and bringing me shopping. Being sick and hatefully feeling helpless has brought something positive to light and that is that I am so so lucky to have such wonderful people who care about me. Oksana brought over a lovely home cooked meal for me last night. Armen despite his mum visiting for a month and being busy at work has also been popping in. Jim came up from London. And they offered to drive me all the way to Wales to see my mum for the next part of the family saga. See post above
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