11 days ago I was wheeled back to the surgery room (yes, I remember this) and I told all the doctors, "Have fun taking the majority of my stomach out. I'm so ready for this...just don't mess up." The last thing I heard before I was knocked out was laughter. If you ask me, that's a great thing to hear before you undergo any major surgery. When I woke up, there wasn't any more laughing. Actually, I had Nurse Hatchet as my post op nurse. I remember thinking, "this lady is in the wrong field." She wouldn't listen to me when I told her how much pain I was in. All she would say was, "of course you're in pain, you just had surgery." Needless to say, the hospital messed up and didn't give me the right meds and that's why I was in so much pain. If Nurse Hatchet would have listened to the half asleep, babbling girl in post op, she may have noticed the hospital's mistakes and fixed them. Instead, I had to deal with horrific pain for 5 hours before my husband finally said something to the nurse who was caring for me in my room. Due to my chronic back pain, I am on some major feel good drugs. Knowing this, they still put me on medication that was lower than what I normally take. However, thanks to my passive aggressive (sometimes there's no passive about it) husband, I was placed on the correct meds and began healing.
Once I came home, I was shocked at all the gas I had to expel. While in the hospital all I did was burp a few times but once I got home, the gas couldn't find a way out fast enough. It didn't care why exit it used as long as it escaped. I learned that walking helped me get the gasses out even faster. The crazy thing is that no matter how long I walked, the gas seemed to wait to exit once I was done and in the house. My husband swears I held it in and let it out in the house on purpose just to prove he didn't marry a woman. He has told me multiple times this week that I am a man with a vagina....because no woman expels that much gas. To be honest, there were times I wondered if he was right.
Then came the mood swings. My moods were swinging around like the chimpanzees in your local zoo. Maybe even more accurate would be my moods were going up and down faster than any express elevator I've ever been on and the aftermath of my mood swings was equal to any hurricane that has ever passed through the area. To make it worse, all my anger was directed at my husband. He had a huge bulls-eye on him and I aimed for a perfect score as many times a day as I could. The worst part is that I felt myself verbally attacking the man I love and I couldn't stop myself. He could say, "how are you doing today?" and I would unleash my wrath upon him because he was being condescending or just plain overbearing. The poor man became so afraid to talk that even that began to piss me off. Lucky for my marriage, things have calmed down quit a bit. So for now, we are not headed to divorce, but this journey isn't over yet, so we'll see.
The other thing that I seem to worry about more than I ever have is my urine and bowel movements. I never thought I would care this much about how much I peed and what my poop looked like or why I haven't pooped. I feel like a mother changing her child's dippers except the baby is me and the dipper is the toilet. I found myself calling my sister and asking if it's normal that I haven't pooped in five days. Apparently it is. Good to know. Now I can sleep better.
It seems like in a week and a half, I have experienced some crazy things. I can't wait to see what other crazy things I experience down the road. No matter what they are, I will try to find the humor in them and share. Good luck to everyone else out there going through this. And, to the people who are just thinking about having this done. It's not easy, but it's not as hard as you might think it is either. Just make sure you find the funny in everything. Because if you can find something to make you laugh at it all, it's much easier to swallow than any crushed up pill you have to take after surgery.
