I want my stamina back. Someone give me a magic stick (wand?) so I can wave it and make myself feel super perky and awesome and not all bloated and swollen and hurt-y and sluggish. Four abdominal surgeries in 26 months is rough. Two abdominal surgeries just ten weeks apart is brutal. I’m 10 days post-op today, but let me tell you, I’m not up for walking from one end of my house to the other and back again without feeling it. My belly isn’t as swollen as it was before, but even with Spanx (more for support than pretty sexy slimness at this moment) I’m still a bloated mess. I just took a Vicodin after battling soreness and twinges of pain and a severe feeling of being bruised from sternum to groin all day long. But I can see my toes again! Progress, right?

It’s 11:30pm on a Friday night, and while the rest of the mid-to-late 20-somethings of the world are doing relaxing or fun stuff offline or online, I’m eyeing my bed with more than a little longing. But I have a few work-related tasks to take care of before I go to bed, and I have some *cough*torrented*cough* downloads to rename, organize, and transfer to our media server (does anyone remember David the Gnome? I downloaded a bunch of episodes in the hopes of getting Alyssa and Ryan into it. I loved that show when I was a kid!).

Oh – there’s also hot pink hair dye in my hair. After I finally dragged myself into the shower, I forced myself to stand in front of the bathroom mirror and take five or so minutes to slather my hair with Manic Panic’s Hot Hot Pink. I accidentally used some regular (sulfate) shampoo a few times after my surgery, and turned my hot fuschia hair into pale blah cotton candy pink. Nothing against cotton candy pink, except that it does not go with my natural hair color, or my skin tone (Jenn =/= pastels). And speaking of dye, Ryan asked for green (and after doing my hair hot pink, turquoise, and purple over the past year, and then giving Alyssa hot pink streaks, who the hell am I to say no?), so my Bean is now green. Squee. It’s cute, though subtle (though it may look more vibrant in the daytime). He’s very excited to show his teachers and therapists (yes, my son is so damn special¹, he has two of them – one for each class). on Monday. He’s been showing them his newest skill – buttoning and unbuttoning. I showed him how to button up an adorable flannel button-down shirt the other morning, and according to what his therapists have written in his notebook, he’s spending his school days doing his school work and unbuttoning and buttoning his shirts all day long. But on the bright side, he’s no longer chewing on his shirt sleeves, or his school papers². He has five or six button-down shirts, but if need be I’ll get him some more. Heh.

Thank you for subscribing to Jenn.nu's RSS feed! ♥ Jenn | Flickr: kiss-my-kitty | Twitter: @kissmykitty

I can’t wait until I feel like myself again. The residual grogginess and fogginess from the anesthesia and initial crazy doses of IV-strength anti-nausea medication, Morphine, Dilaudid, and Percocet went away by Friday, but I’m still in enough pain that I’m taking painkillers, though I’m not taking them religiously, every four hours, like I initially did the first few days after surgery. I’m feeling better enough that I’m starting to feel restless, and am being driven just a little crazy by the various little messes and areas of disarray (small, minor, nothing to write home about, let alone give Dan any grief about; since he’s busting his ass working, taking care of kids & house, and me) around the house.

But I have to remind myself to take it easy, because when I don’t – like early this afternoon – I pay for it dearly. Plus, seeing as how I still need a bit of help getting myself in and out of bed, and out of the recliner when it’s in the reclined position, I shouldn’t be helping Ryan sort his games, or Alyssa pick up her five hundred and forty nine Littlest Pet Shop pieces. But the Must Be Clean and Organized with a Slight Case of OCD Queen inside of me begs to differ. Until I’m hurting so bad and am swollen so bad that I can’t stand up straight or draw a full breath, and I practically fall out of the shower into Dan’s arms, who helps me dress, feeds me a Vicodin and a protein shake, and puts me to bed for several hours.

I have also found out, the hard way (intense abdominal pain, vomiting), that I cannot tolerate solid food right now. Protein shakes, soft/mushy soups, and egg souffle (and even that is a little iffy) are okay. Anything else? No freaking way. Slightly annoying, but I have plenty of powder for protein shakes, and a lot of frozen-into-Jenn-portions soup stockpiled in our chest freezer. Also? I lost 2.2 lbs since Tuesday morning. There’s always a silver lining. ;)

My last few days, as documented by crappy cell phone and iPod Touch pictures:

Jason made mini donuts! (And my kids ate them all this morning.)

Kitten cuddles.

I’m allergic to Penicillin…and most forms of surgical tape.

Hospital discharge goal: not dying (helpfully added by Jason.

And yes, I really do wedge a pillow under my swollen belly so that I can sorta/kinda comfortably side sleep.

Thank you for subscribing to Jenn.nu's RSS feed! ♥ Jenn | Flickr: kiss-my-kitty | Twitter: @kissmykitty

Yes, that is as painful as it sounds. Doubly so when you take into account the fact that I just had a very similar surgery ten weeks ago. I woke up, groggy and so out of it I was barely able to open my eyes (though I do recall a nurse yelling at me not to rub my eyes due to the risk of a corneal abrasion due to dry eyes after surgery), but very much aware of being in so much pain that I wanted to die. A voice asked my pain threshold on a scale of 1-10. I responded with, “15“, was shot up with several doses of Morphine (at least two that I know of), and then I went back to blissful la-la-land, waking up perhaps an hour or two later to find myself in my room.

I stayed overnight this time. Dan and Jason were both with me initially. Then Jason left to go back to our house to be there for when Alyssa and Ryan got home, and he fed them dinner and them brought them back to visit me. Jason then stayed with me overnight while Dan took the kids home and put them to bed. But not before helping me to the bathroom first.

Ah, the first bathroom trip after surgery. It’s what I dread most about post-op. Despite being heavily medicated, holding a pillow to my stomach as a splint, and having both Dan and Jason’s help in getting out of bed and making the longggggggg trek down to the other end of the recovery suite (of course the only patient who had abdominal surgery was put in the room that was only second-furthest away from the bathroom), it was agonizing. Dan had to help me get down onto the toilet, and it took several minutes for my still half-asleep bladder to wake up enough to do its job. And walking back… I seriously nearly fainted. My vision began darkening at the edges, and my normal hearing was replaced with a dull roar that got progressively louder as my vision got progressively darker and the pain in my stomach got progressively more excruciating. It was a relief to get back to my bed, though of course the twisting motions involved with sitting down and then laying down are nowhere near pain-free.

I was discharged around 11:00am Wednesday morning, after a night of drug-induced sleep broken up by pain and painful bathroom trips. Oh, and then there was the hour and 15 minutes in which I asked a nurse for more pain medication twice, was assured that I’d receive it, and then was promptly forgotten about. It just so happened that as I was painfully inching my way down my hospital bed towards the foot of it, where I hoped to be able to reach the tote bag that contained the newly-filled prescription for Percocet, that my actual nurse (not the useless nurse’s assistant) happened to walk in, took one look at my face (I was crying by that point), got me back in bed, and loaded me up with Percocet and ice packs for my belly (SO AMAZING) and compression boots for my legs and a fresh blanket and reamed out the nurse’s assistant in front of me, apologized profusely, and then personally checked on me multiple times throughout the rest of the night and early morning.

Oy. But shitty nurses (nice personalities, just crappy as nurses – BRING ME THE DRUGS, WOMEN!) aside, and Jason’s additional goal to my list of discharge goals, which made everybody who saw it laugh, and me apparently taking a swing at Jason the one time when he woke me up so a doctor could talk to me (I still have no idea why I did that, so I’ll blame it on the drugs), my hospital stay was uneventful. The wheelchair ride was uncomfortable, the car ride home was uncomfortable, dragging myself into the house sucked, but once I was settled in bed and re-medicated with fresh ice packs on my stomach, all was as well as could be.

I slept surprisingly well last night, which I thank Tylenol PM for. That combined with the Percocet seems to be enough to give me 4-6 hours of interrupted sleep, which is more than I’ve ever gotten post-op with just pain medication alone.

Now I have annoying itchiness and burning to add to my post-op misery – either my surgeon or her team didn’t listen to me say over and over that I’m allergic to whatever surgical tape they used after the last two surgeries, because THEY USED IT AGAIN. UGH. I peeled it off tonight, patted dry the already-oozing areas around the incisions, put a tiny bit of Neosporin on the incisions themselves and then Band-Aids over them, but it’s too late – I’m already developing a reaction. I’m going to slather on some topical analgesic, and Dan is going to pick up Benadryl on his way home from work.

Hopefully this is the last time I have to go through all of this anxiety and pain and misery. I don’t know how much more I can take of all this!

Thank you for subscribing to Jenn.nu's RSS feed! ♥ Jenn | Flickr: kiss-my-kitty | Twitter: @kissmykitty

On October 12th, 2010, I had my gallbladder removed.

On November 23rd, 2011, after a year dealing with random, hours-long bouts of excruciating abdominal pain, for which I went to the ER not once, not twice but four times, and underwent several tests and scans (ultrasound, xray, ct scans (2), upper gis (2), endoscopies (2), even a colonoscopy), I had exploratory laparoscopic abdominal surgery in order to find and fix the cause of my ongoing abdominal pain.

Despite a longer-than-anticipated recovery from my most recent surgery, and annoying and painful intestinal swelling/abdominal bloating that made my boobs look even more pathetic than they are and me look about four months pregnant, this most recent surgery did not fix the problem. Or at least, it did not fix the problem in its entirety. Last Thursday, while at the mall with Dan and the kids, my abdomen started aching. I brushed it off as post-op pain, until we got closer to home and the pain intensified, and I recognized it for what it was: pain that was identical to what I had been dealing with for the past year, and most definitely not pre-op pain.

For the next hour I sat in the living room in a nice medication-induced stupor, while I cried and ranted to Dan and Jason not just about the pain, but about the fact that the pain signified that the issue was still there, and that I’d have to undergo another abdominal surgery and deal with that stress and anxiety and fear (despite four abdominal surgeries I am still terrified of them) and pain all over again, when I was just finally getting over the pain of the most recent one.

Yesterday I had my follow-up/post-op visit with my bariatric surgeon, who confirmed what I already knew: another surgery. Despite being very doubtful that the issue is a simple infection in the length of small intestine that was manually brought up, looped over and surgically attached to my stomach pouch (my “new” stomach; my “old” stomach is attached to my abdominal wall and is no longer in use, obviously), my bariatric surgeon and her co-surgeon are putting me on a month’s worth of antibiotics, just to rule out that slight possibility. Infections in this particular length of altered small intestine occur when the small intestine flips or loops around, causing “stagnation” with ingested food and/or liquids. But since I am not having any signs of an infection (reflux, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, fever), and since these painful attacks have no correlation or relation to what I ate or when I last ate, the most probable cause, along with the intestinal “void” issue (which was fixed during the surgery on November 23rd), is that this particular piece of small intestine is doing a “candy cane” maneuver – where it’s lengthened/stretched for whatever reason, and its length causes pulling/twisting/flipping – hence the pain.

“Candy cane roux” syndrome is the official diagnosis. My surgeon noted the excess length/stretch of this piece of intestine on 11/23, but she didn’t want to mess with it because she hoped my issue was the empty areas around the lower portion of my small intestines, which allowed those portions to jump and twist and flip around. The piece of intestine that’s higher up and near my stomach pouch tends to bleed and swell a lot when messed with, hence it’s riskier to deal with and more likely to result in (still rare) complications.

Today I am calling the bariatric center at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD for a second opinion (hopefully I can get an over-the-phone appointment instead of having to make the two hour drive down and back, but I’ll go if necessary), but from everything I’ve read, the diagnosis is plausible and very likely, especially since my surgeon did note the change in that piece of small intestine.

So the plan for this next month is to take the 30 days worth of antibiotics, just to make sure that an infection isn’t an issue (which it most likely isn’t, due to lack of symptoms and just the presence of intense pain). The antibiotics are supposed to work quickly, so if in a week from now I have another pain attack, I’ll basically be waiting around three weeks before calling my surgeon to schedule surgery for late January or early February.

Sigh.

But sighing aside, even with this complication and the very strong possibility of another surgery next months, I still do not regret having gastric bypass surgery. (And even if I did, regret is a moot point and a wasted emotion. I can’t go back in time – I can only go forward.)

Thank you for subscribing to Jenn.nu's RSS feed! ♥ Jenn | Flickr: kiss-my-kitty | Twitter: @kissmykitty

• Took the kids to the bus stop instead of letting them walk (Ryan has been having issues with meltdowns when he’s not first in line for the bus, prompting the other, older kids to imitate him and make fun of him. Motherfuckers.) Besides, it was really bitter this morning!
• Went to the post office to mail presents and baked goods to Cat & co.
• Checked PO box – found cards from Nichole and Karyn!
• Donated four bags of clean, folded, and like-new condition clothes that Alyssa and Ryan have outgrown (several pairs of jeans and khakis, sweaters, a few dresses and at least one dozen skirts)
• Made homemade chocolate cupcakes (though I got lazy and used store-bought icing instead of making my own, heh) for Ryan’s therapist, who was sweet enough to drop off a home-cooked meal last weekend – took those and her dishes to her house and left them with her son
• Took a few holiday/winter photos
• Folded laundry
• Caught up with social network feeds
• Clipped coupons
• Made several calls concerning my brother – he sees his psychiatrist on Thursday
• Made a few calls concerning myself – last Thursday night I had an attack of abdominal pain that was identical to what I have been having all throughout the year and up until surgery, which means that the problem is not solved, which means that I could be facing a second surgery. I’m so upset… and as if my body wants to prove its point, another attack is starting up now.

Cupcakes!

Awesome fingerless gloves + awesome nail polish (Deborah Lippman’s “Forget You”) = awesomeness.

And now I’m off to tackle work stuff. How’s your Monday going so far?

Thank you for subscribing to Jenn.nu's RSS feed! ♥ Jenn | Flickr: kiss-my-kitty | Twitter: @kissmykitty