The luxury of recovering at home

Oh, what a joy and a luxury it is to be recovering at home! I am so glad to have escaped the noise and bustle of the hospital to recover in the comfort of my own home, under the tender, loving care of my mom and with the doggie curled up by my side.

I have been healing nicely, with my pain pretty well controlled by medication most of e time. While the pain meds work, I feel pretty swell, actually. When it's about an hour until I get to take the next pain pill, though, I sometimes wish the wait weren't quite that long. Without pain medication I would be quite uncomfortable. So it's a good thing to have those little magic pills that make the pain vanish.

Tis time around, the incisions seem to be much smaller than I expected them to be. They are healing nicely, although the presence of a surgical drain is always a bit uncomfortable. But it's tolerable. This morning the drain got clogged, though, and wouldn't reinflate after I stripped it. An hour's worth of milking and stripping later, the drain finally opened up again, and the serum color actually started changing from angry red to soothing pale straw. Sorry if this is TMI, but this color change is a good sign. Just in case you wanted to know...

So I am feeling pretty good overall. My mom, the dog, and I went for a nice stroll along the beach promenade today. It was the first warm and sunny day and I enjoyed the warm breeze off the sea and the smell of the briny deep. I even had the energy to stop by the grocery store afterwards. That's not too shabby for being only three days post-surgery!

The things that bother me the most at this point include the drain discomfort, tenderness at the site where the IV was, tenderness where some careless surgeon burned me with an electrocautery knife (two spots, one on my left foob and one on my left shoulder -- I'd really like to know how that happened...), and painkiller-related digestive discomfort. All in all these are relatively minor issues, though. I really cannot complain too much.