Yesterday was quiet, more sleeping and watching movies all day long. I have several discs from CSI:Miami, Season 1 (which I never watched on TV) to keep me company. It’s a bit gory, but I like the bright sunshine and the plot lines are nicely simple. One thing: my sister arrived. She promptly cooked dinner and helped J. do some housework. We needed the help and she is a blessing.
Sleeping on my back is weird. Getting into and out of bed is hard, and painful. I’m glad I’m in fairly good shape, I can’t imagine doing this if I were frail, weak, or obese. To get in bed, I sit on the edge, as far back as I can. J. helps my turn my legs onto the bed, I then tighten my core muscles, stiffen my torso, and let J. help me lie down. Just before the last inches there is a horrid ‘tearing’ feeling in my chest, on the left side of my breast-like object, right where it meets the sternum. It brings tears to my eyes, its worrying.
Another dozy night . . . although I feel like I slept for longer periods, like an hour or 90 minutes. At 7am, my IV alarm went off. This happened yesterday, and its disconcerting at first. But the alarm just tells us that there is about 20 minutes left of drip. So, it was annoying, and it woke me up, but I didn’t worry. After a few minutes I called in and was told someone would be by in a few minutes to take care of it. That woke my bladder up, so I decided to go ahead and get up and start my day. The leg-massagers (more about them in a moment) were annoying, but I managed to get them unhooked and swung around so I was sitting on the side of my bed. Minutes passed. I stood up (yay! NO dizziness!!!!) and verified that yes, the only thing preventing me from going to the bathroom was the IV monitors’ electrical plug into the wall. Unfortunately, I couldn’t bend over to pull it out. So I had to wait, listening to the alarm, which was still low on the annoying scale, but growing higher. At 7:20, I called again — apologies, we’ll be right there! And at 7:35 someone came. Just in time, I was getting desperate.
The tough thing about surgery and pain meds is that the whole process really does horrid things to your body. I’m not a doctor, but how I’ve come to think of it is that when they do major surgery, they have to shut your whole system down to be able to work freely. So, recovering from surgery means restarting all of your systems. Its one reason they are so concerned with your bodily wastes — its an easy way to see that many systems are functioning again.
I have several good friends coming over in a few hours, each bringing an item for our potluck Thanksgiving. J. is cooking his first turkey, and attempting a wilted spinach salad, I’m making my signature smashed potatoes (1/2 sweet, 1/2 regular, easy on the butter), and cranberry sauce. My pumpkin butter canning plan went awry (no jars!), so I also have a pumpkin bundt cake to offer.
Throughout the day I’ll be calling and talking with family. We all have a great deal to be thankful for, this year more so than others.
I am profoundly grateful for the man I love and share my life with, for my true friends far away and near, for my exasperating, glorious family, and for the Lord and Lady who give me challenges I must stretch to achieve.
Blessed Be.
Friday the 13th! Today is very weird, not only because I woke up in a hospital, but because I have large gap in my memory of yesterday. I rely on my memory a great deal, having gaps is fairly distressing, even if I know why. In a way, it gives me a glimpse into why people with amnesia freak out so badly, it must be incredibly disorienting, frightening.
Now that my pain meds are greatly reduced, I’m feeling more able to write again. So I’ll be posting a series of ‘time machine’ posts starting from 11/13 and going forward. I may repeat myself, but they are the posts I would have written at the time, but couldn’t. The posts will be put up in real time, but dated in the past.
As an update for today (11/25): I still have a drain in, so I am still quite limited in my mobility/abilities. I am quite stir-crazy and bored. I am doing some work which is at least challenging. I am slightly grumpy. Hopefully the drain will come out Friday.
I’m a bit late with my November update at Facing North — I have about 20 reviews in various states of progress and another 1/2 dozen or so from other people.
I may end up doing two updates in December. But I’m trying for at least a small update this weekend.
In other news, Jason Pitzl-Waters of The Wild Hunt has made Facing North an affiliate which is great news. I’m darn proud of my review site, and all of the hard work my reviewers put into the 100s of reviews we’ve written. Hopefully the affiliation will draw more attention to the site and get us into an even busier place.
No, really. As a comment to an earlier post, I received this:
Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.
This is a worthwhile sentiment, and inspiring at this time in my life. But it came from a spammer (the supposed sender is a rugby player; I just went to the site again to check specifics and it was flagged as ‘Warning Unsafe content’ and had been taken down).
Weirdness of the day.
