Now what? Post-surgery

So I'm playing a little catchup here...

This is what happened when I got out of surgery:
I spent 5 days in the hospital where the nurses and residents at UW were awesome. My parents were staying with me and I had a few good visitors as well. I definitely slept most of the time- which is annoying because if you've ever been in the hospital they have to take your vitals every 4 hrs. More often if you have the epidural. During the night I just started sleeping with one arm out so that when they came in I could just keep my eyes closed and raise my arm to get the blood pressure. It was definitely interesting being on this side of the medical world- I remember how much I hated waking patients up to get their vitals. At least nurses aren't as bad as the residents- they usually come in around 5-6am in herds.

The stay was pretty uneventful. As expected, on day two I had to get up and take a walk around the unit. Because I had an epidural, my catheter was still in and so it got to accompany me and my IV pole. I'm sure my dad snuck a few pics of me strolling around with my pee bag. I remember it hurt only a little when I rolled over in bed, but not much else until the day the epidural wore off. Then I had some bad burning-like pain. But I had my PCA -personal "get-me-high" button to push when the pain started so that helped. Basically, I just watched movies on my laptop, saw a few friends, and tried to keep my dad from playing with the IV equipment.

I was sent home with 4-6wks predicted recovery time and an arsenal of drugs. I got xtra-strength Tylenol, Extra Strength Ibuprofen, Dilaudid (super narcotic), stool softeners, and hormone-replacement patches. Dilaudid, which is supposed to be an opiod stronger than morphine and oxy, etc worked pretty well for my pain but absolutely knocked me out at home. I would wake up, take my Dilaudid, sleep for 3 hours until it wore off, and then repeat. That's like 8 naps a day! I had to take the stool softeners as well to prevent the narcotic-induced constipation.

The hormone-replacement was another story. It's weird. I will be prescribing this to patients in their 40s and 50s- not at 28! But because my body has NO means to make estrogen without the ovaries, I have basically underwent immediate menopause. Now I understand why my mom cranks the AC down to 50 in the summer- the hot flashes are awful. I experienced my first one the other day and stayed up all night because i was too warm to sleep. The patch they gave me ended up being way too low of a dose- as it was meant for aging women who still have some residual ovarian function. Now I take a huge dose of 2mg (the previous dosage of combined patch was maxed 0.5mg) which is a little scary but definitely beneficial!

The hardest part at this time was that now I had to tell people that I actually had cancer. Everyone before had been reassuring: "oh it's just a cyst," or "I'm sure it'll be nothing". Now I had to make that awful phone call and tell them that actually everything wasn't alright and that now the bad feeling I had had all along was justified. Fortunately I got my parents to make some calls- they made some calls as soon as I returned from surgery which really helped. I definitely was in no state of mind for that conversation for awhile. Telling people was the hardest part of that first week. I would do anything for someone else to break the news. I didn't really care who knew. I just got really sick of the "Are you serious?" "How did this all start?" "What now?". This is where the blog comes in handy....