Monday, July 09, 2007

Don't Cry For Me, It's Inguinal

Gloria's suggestion for the post title was "The Girl From Inguinal."

Surgery went very smoothly on Friday, and even though the doctor said I'd be falling asleep in the middle of a sentence, I wasn't really that sleepy. I answered a few e-mails, sat on the couch for a while, and since he told me to use pain medication liberally the first few days, took a Vicodin.

That was about 3:30 p.m. The prescription said I could take two at once, but I didn't want to be completely knocked out, so I just took one.

At 7 p.m., I felt a bit of pain coming on, so I took one more. I'd eaten beforehand, because I didn't want to have any stomach problems.

At that point, everything was going great. Smooth sailing.

At 7:30 p.m., I was so nauseous that I literally couldn't move my head. It was an awful feeling.

Which lasted for twelve hours.

No sleep Friday night, just feeling like I was going to throw up any second. Which I would have gone ahead and done, but the thought of using those "heaving" muscles (some of which had just been cut) was enough to make me hold off. So I watched a documentary on Atomic Bomb testing on the Discovery Channel (excellent), a horror movie about cockroaches (can't recommend it), and "The Babysitter's Club" (after not sleeping for a full day, this was surprisingly entertaining).

At 6 a.m., I broke down and called the doctor. For some reason, calling in the middle of the night seemed like bad form (I know, that's incredibly stupid, but I thought it was going to stop any minute, and thought that for the entire twelve hours).

After some anti-nausea medication, I started to improve. Bad, bad night.

So I stopped taking Vicodin, and even though they wrote me a prescription for Darvocet, I wasn't willing to even try it, because I didn't want to take a chance on getting sick again. So I've been taking the anti-nausea medication once a day and regular Tylenol for the pain.

Which has worked really well, much to my surprise. High pain thresholds have many benefits.

I even drove to lunch yesterday, which I'm pretty sure was ahead of schedule. So I wish time would pass a little more quickly, but other than that, I'm fine.

I'm behind on e-mail, but I'll be catching up over the next couple of days.

Site Meter