January 12, 2011
I was instructed to take vicodin every four hours so I had to be woken up at 1am and 5am. My drains also needed to be measured. The only discomfort I could feel, aside from in my back, was the binder and padding, but I quickly fell back asleep until 9am when I'd have to take another pain med. My chest didn't hurt at all, though. And I didn't feel nauseous at all, which made me happy. I wasn't hungry but I made myself eat a granola bar and drink orange juice. After my stomach settled we all went outside for about ten minutes. It felt really important for me to get fresh air since anasthesia can potentially cause mild depression and, having a history of depression, it seemed like a good idea (I've seen some places where patients would recommend a small prescription of anti-depressants, but that never made sense to me. You have to wait six weeks to even know if they work, and it's pretty impossible to know what meds will and will not work after immediately starting them). Sitting outside was brief and exhausting, but nice. After that, I pretty much just slept and drank water.
January 13, 2011
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Pretty much the same schedule as yesterday. I had a hard time falling back asleep after 5am, though, because of noise outside the hotel room. I told Olex as he handed me medicine that I wish my chest hurt at least a bit so I'd know why alarms were going off at weird hours. My back had been hurting a lot since I got back to the hotel, but I figured it was just because I wasn't used to binding for extensive periods of time anymore. The last year or so before surgery, I was pretty much only wearing my binder when venturing out in warm weather because it had become too uncomfortable for me to power through. For some reason my hips and knees were hurting a lot as well, but that was just because my body dislikes sleeping in one position all night. At 9am I decided I wanted to clean up a bit so Olex got some babywipes and wiped my arms, shoulders and back. We also put a bit of shampoo on a washcloth and wiped my hair. It didn't do much, but I'd like to think it made a difference in my mood. I then decided to shave my face and Jess got some good pictures with both mine and his camera. I went outside again and Jess grabbed a chair from our room because the hotel staff didn't want us to drag a bench out from the shade (Jess joked about how he was so Boston because "if something's not bolted down..."). It felt nice to be warm, but I quickly got tired and eased myself back into bed. In the evening I decided I wanted to try spacing out the vicodin doses to every six hours to see what would happen.
January 14, 2011
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I was woken up at 1am and 7am for vicodin. It had gotten warm so I sweated a bit in my sleep and I felt gross in the morning. Olex cleaned me up and I had a donut for breakfast. I was expecting to fall asleep after because that's what happened before, but I managed to stay up. I started feeling more "alive" and looked forward to not missing anything exciting. By late morning I was bored and wondered what the hell Olex and Jess had been doing with themselves when I'd be asleep. The binder and padding continued to annoy me. Some moments were better than others, though. It was fun trying to picture what my chest looked like. I had peeked a couple times at the tape holding the padding but I didn't dare explore further. The fear one has of irreparably damaging their chest by doing the tiniest thing is very real. Even knowing full well that pulling my binder even the smallest bit further down wouldn't do anything did nothing to assuage me.