Recovery

It's been 6 days since the operation, and I'm still wiped out. I don't know if this recovery is harder, or if maybe I expected it to be easy and it isn't. In any case I'm still spending too much time sleeping, and am tired all the time. The pain comes and goes, so I'm still taking Percocet. That may have more to do with my tiredness than anything.

The other night Gloria, my youngest, was goofing around on the couch and body slammed me on my left side, opposite the incision. I thought I was going cry it hurt so bad. Just a little reminder that there's still a lot of healing left to do.

On the up side, I've managed to avoid the more hideous side effects that were possible from this stuff (incontenence being the big one). So the outlook is still optimistic, I just need to be more patient.

Done With Surgery

I am home now. They released me from the hospital yesterday at about 9:00am, less then 48 hours after the surgery. I am in some discomfort, the incision is pretty tender still. The Percocet prescription helps, but puts me in a bit of a fog. My plan is to stay foggy today, and back off the stuff in favor of Motrin/Advil by the end of the week.

Everything is going great, I start chemo on Monday, the surgeries are completely done. It's good to be coming down the home stretch.

Greetings from Miami Valley Hospital

It's Sunday afternoon, surgery was yesterday. Everything is going as expected. I was done with surgery and awake by about 3 in the afternoon yesterday. I spent the afternoon on bed rest, alternating between sleeping and watching the NFL draft. Julie and the girls had a very busy day yesterday. Ashley had a track thing she had to do. She helped out at a 4th grade girls track meet. Then they went to a friend of ours' daughter's first communion. They didn't make it here to the hospital until after 8pm. Then they were all so tired they only stayed an hour or so. That's ok, it's pretty boring hanging out in somebody's hospital room.

Today, I got the catheter out, so I can now walk around. I've taken a couple walks today, which has really aggravated the pain. It's not too bad, though. My surgeon (Dr. Paul Connover, the absolute best rectal surgeon in the region) stopped in today, checked out the incision. It's a horizontal scar about 3 inches long about where an appendectomy scar would be. Looked pretty good to me.

I'm very optimistic about my recovery, we're just waiting now for my digestive system to wake up and start functioning. Once that happens I can eat regular food. Right now I'm still on a liquid diet; Jello, pudding, tomato soup, fruit juice.

This surgery is so much less of an ordeal than the last one, it's not even funny.