Catching up

It's been a while since I posted anything. Funny how surgery can just turn your whole life upside down. Things never really settle back to where they were either.

On March 11 I had Pleurodesis surgery. To say it was hard or trying or difficult does not even cover it. I spent 24 hours in the CICU, mostly for pain management. The patient in the next room was having a rough night and coded twice in two hours, leaving me with a new phobia of loud dinging machines sounding the warning that all is not well. Directly after surgery, I had tubes coming out of everywhere. Dan and Angela stayed with me all night as I faded in and out of consciousness.

My pain was managed really well, even if I did hallucinate fairly often on the drugs--that it worth its own blog entry. I had an epidural with a timed morphine drip and it stayed in place from Friday (surgery) until Monday morning when the doctor and nurses were getting me ready to go home for Tuesday. I actually cried when they removed the epidural...not because it hurt to remove it, but because it was working so well and I didn't want to feel the pain.

The first meds to control the pain didn't work at all. I think they were giving me percoset and something else. The percoset would stop working about 40 minutes before I was allowed another dose. The pain would start like a low throb in my side...hospitals like you to give a number for pain, so mine would start at a 3, but would rocket into a 10 within 15 minutes, leaving me crying. After two times of that experience, I started calling the nurse earlier to try to head it off but it didn't always work. She would come in and give me demerol in this special IV thing they put in my neck. The first dose of demerol was too high and I pretty much left the solar system but boy did it make the pain go away too. After that, I asked for less so that I could stay somewhat coherent. I could see making friends with demerol for the long haul, it really makes everything go away. In all my recent experience with Rx drugs, it is the only one I could see developing an addiction to, and I have had quite a few come my way---morphine, vicodin, darvocet, percocet, etc.

I was taking pain medicine around the clock on a set schedule for my first two weeks home. Or maybe it was the first three weeks, everything is so sketchy in my brain as far as the real timeline of things. I started to back off the pain meds when I started chemo because the pain meds were making my appetite stay away and I was actually getting too thin...thin enough so that in the hospital, my surgeon was actually making comments about me eating a whole chocolate torte and how that would be good therapy for me. When's the last time you heard a cardiologist say such a thing?

I actually had to take appetite stimulant. What kind of Italian am I to need such a thing? As a woman, I have eaten hundreds if not thousands of times when I was not hungry but it is impossible to eat without your appetite. I am the smallest/thinnest I have been since high school. Maybe middle school. I feel like they gave me someone else's body before I left the hospital. The weight loss was so rapid that even I can notice how different I look.

I started chemo three weeks after surgery and it kicked my ass back to the stone age. I was really sick and nauseated, and I even vomited in the infusion room. In my year of being in the infusion room, I never saw anyone do that! It took me about ten days to feel normal again and since then I have felt better and better every day.

At my post op appointment with the surgeon, I learned that I now have fluid developing on my left side of the lungs. I'm not sure what will be done about that, but it is the reason I'm still winded going upstairs. On an up note, my right side has healed beautifully and my incisions are all closed up. I do still have surgery site pain, but its getting easier to deal with.