Recovery

I must say I hope to never have another surgery in my life.  

The first three days after surgery I was so out of it I don't remember very much, there is just a haze in my brain of certain things that went on around me.  Starting around Thursday of last week I was able to make sense of things and trying to wean myself back into a normal routine.

I am so sensitive to drugs of any kind and I am just now beginning to feel like I am free of the narcotics I had to take for pain last week.  

I really tried not to take too many after the first 3 days.  I could usually make it through the mornings, but by the late evening the pain and burning sensation would take over and I would give in and take a pain killer and/or anti-inflammatory.  It would take about an hour before the hallucinations would begin.  I don't enjoy hallucinations at all.  Abstract art I can take, swirling colors in my head are another thing entirely. Due to the hallucinations I wasn't getting any sleep so I added in the Ambien the Dr. prescribed to help me with that issue.  BIG MISTAKE!!! Ambien will never again enter my system.

I remember some of the hallucinations very vividly. 

• There were the freaky clowns that were chasing me and making howling sounds. They were loose in surrounding areas and causing so much havoc the CIA came in and took them away.  My son tried to stop me from posting on Facebook, but at that time I had to warn people that the clowns were there but it would be okay because of the CIA.
  
• One night I had these giant foam pinwheels spinning towards me coming from each side of my peripheral vision.  There were three on each side, one was bright yellow, there was a red one and a royal blue one.  As I watched them spin towards me wondering if they would smash my nose, cross over, or crash I looked forward only to see a huge dried apple doll zombie coming towards me.  That made for a very bad evening.  

The night that has stayed with me the most is the one where I had this dream about going to the doctor for an endoscopy that I was awake through.  It was a woman doctor and she was very nice.  I was able to watch the entire procedure as if I was the doctor looking through the camera.  I watched the scope enter my esophagus which was a pretty pale pink and I saw the ridges as the camera continued down.  Right before she entered my stomach the doctor said "I wonder how long that has been in there?" and she used tongs on the end of the camera to remove a pretty good sized pink and blue dinosaur skeleton from the end of my esophagus.   It was quite amazing.  As I was leaving the doctor's office I was handed a bag of fliers and envelopes and told to go home and stuff the envelopes and mail them as that was required of each patient to promote the doctor.  The problem was I didn't go home.  I went to a hootenanny and met up with a bunch of women I saw at the Dallas Quilt Show. We booked rooms in this musty hotel and drank some nasty red moonshine and danced the evening away. 

By the weekend I was taking only Advil and living with the burning sensation. 

I have had my follow up visit and start PT tomorrow morning and will be going back to work with many restrictions on Monday.  I am not cleared to drive yet, but I am going to try to convince my therapist to let me drive to work since it really is just around the corner from my house.