Happy New Year! Time to get back to my story from last summer…

Recovery

Home at last!

In pain, but I was home at last!

Carol and I planned to make me as comfortable as possible when I got home. I was still a bit woozy from what transpired twenty-four hours earlier. The dog Filbrix was more than happy to see me. She tempered her usual enthusiastic greeting, sensing my temporary infirmity.

There were some inconveniences, like the bandages.

I had four incisions, each covered by bandages designed to help hold my incisions in place until my body would hold together by itself. Used to be stitches, now instead, the pieces are held together with Superglue. I had instructions to leave the bandages on until they fell off in the shower, which I could not take for a day or two after surgery. Even though the surgery was at the tail end of August, I had no problem with going ahead and waiting inside – with the air conditioning.

Another inconvenience had to do with sleeping. Over the years I have become accustomed to sleeping on my belly, or at least sleeping on one side or the other. At home, like at the hospital, I had to learn to sleep on my back.

Carol may have had a premonition that there might be something going on requiring a hospital-type bed when we went to a home show six months earlier. It took considerable coaxing and 18 interest-free months of financing, but we went ahead and bought the bed. By the time I got back from the hospital, I still wasn’t used to the bed despite trying a variety of positions including something called “Zero-G.” It didn’t take me long that first night to figure out that I was not going to be comfortable in the fancy bed. The other alternative was the recliner in what passes for our living/family room. It worked well. Filbrix was happy to be able to watch me as I tried to sleep as best I could.

I could have slept better but for the fact that the narcotic prescribed by the doctor to ease my pain was not available at the chain drug store.[1] Carol was told that the drug in question would not be available until the following Tuesday. The day after Labor Day. That left me with Acetaminophen. In my mind, it was not really a good choice for someone like me who had had at least the edge of his liver cut away. There were warnings on the bottle stating that using so many pills in a certain time frame might cause liver damage. Other than the bit of cancer detected a month earlier, my liver was working quite well, thank you very much.

Pain was managed with the idea that maybe a miracle would occur, and the pills prescribed by the doctor would magically appear.

No miracles, but I was able to make it through the Labor Day weekend with just a little bit of problem. One problem averted by not having the narcotic was the constipation associated with narcotic use. Certainly I could tough it out until the following Monday when I was scheduled to see Dr. Palanisamy for my follow-up visit.

There were a couple of problems that caught me by surprise.

Since I was told not to lift anything over 20 pounds, I ran into a problem with the bed. One of the tasks I have set myself was to wash the sheets and make the bed on Fridays. Something I had noted was that the mattress tended to slip off to one side over the course of the week. It was no big deal for me to bounce the mattress off to one side while making the bed. With the weight restriction, I decided to ask Carol to make the correction when she got back from her job.

Well, I forgot.

In the middle of the night when I was attempting to get up to use the bathroom and let the dog out to do her business, I fell out of bed with the mattress coming down on top of me. It took me about five minutes to get up, have Carol put the mattress back on the bed, do what I had originally planned to do, and get back to bed.

On the chair in the living room.

I was thankful at the time, knowing that it could have been worse. I had passed a major hurdle with no other hurdles in sight between me and my visit with the oncologist.

I almost made it to that visit unscathed.

Almost…

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[1] The name of the store and the name of the vendor of the bed are withheld. I don’t want any trouble.