Recovery

After being released, cancer took a back seat to recovery. And that's why we kept the diagnosis relatively quiet. I didn't have an exact diagnosis or treatment plan, and didn't want to face those questions. It was time to focus on healing. 

Two weeks after surgery I was having terrible back spasms. I had never experienced a back spasm. It was absolute misery! Percocet wasn't strong enough to ease the pain, so I just had to breathe through. Of course this started over the weekend, so we had to wait until Monday to revisit my surgeon's office.

Dr. E removed the staples and sent me off for a CT concerned a pulmonary embolism was causing the back spasms. It wasn't, but by the time I returned to the office 4" of my incision reopened and was bleeding profusely. It couldn't be stitched. The wound had to heal from inside out, so home health turned into wound care. The one positive. The nerves didn't have time to heal, so while it looked awful I felt nothing during bandage changes. 

The hardest part of recovery, and I seem to have this with every surgery, is maintaining an appetite so I can take narcotic pain meds. I learned to set alarms so I didn't miss a dose, because a mere 30 minutes late had me practicing Lamaz. After a month on Percocet, I was able to drop down to Loratab. 

Five weeks post-surgery the scans & biopsies started. Around this time I noticed the upper part of my scar getting tight, and assumed it was part of the healing process. Then a little scab came off with a stitch that didn't dissolve, and I noticed pus on the end. Within hours it was blistered and oozing. 

Enter infection & open wound number two. Back to the surgeon's office to have the infection drained. This wound was a little over 2" long, but it was deep and had to be packed. The nerves had healed, so this one was super painful. I took Percocet before bandage changes, and it barely took the edge off. Thankfully my wound care nurses stepped in, so I was only wet packing the wound for five days. We switched over to magical silver gauze and bandage changes became tearless. 

It took three months for the open wounds to close, and amazingly they both closed at the same time.