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Post Surgery
Jul. 27th, 2013 08:27 pmI've never in my life had a worse dry throat as I had after surgery. People are constantly talking to you in recovery, wanting you to talk to them so they know you're okay, but it's kind of hard to talk when your lips are stuck to your teeth and your tongue is glued to the roof of your mouth. Not even the three cups of water helped. I don't think the dryness went away until Thursday.
Weirdest thing about taking major pain meds is that you do things and seem to be very conscious of doing them and then later you think, "did I do that? If so, when?" because you have just a faint memory of actually doing it. And this is after reducing the dosage from every 6 hours to every 12 hours and taking Advil in between instead. This is why driving would not be a good thing. Well, that and navigating a large automobile seems like way too much effort at the moment.
On the plus side I think the pain in my elbow was definitely worse before the surgery. Now it just hurts in a different way, which either means I'm still jacked up on pain meds or the pain isn't nearly as bad as it was (I'm thinking I'm still jacked up because there has been some decent pain). Sure, there are things I can't do, like lift my hand/arm to my chin or wiggle my fingers, either because my arm doesn't want to do it or it hurts too much but there's a lot I can do that doesn't hurt at all. There's an exercise the doctor wanted me to start yesterday, once the splint came off, that's not so bad. But about that splint coming off. No one told me that taking off all the bandages would make me queasy and light-headed. I mentioned this to my boss today and she apologized for forgetting to tell me. She's had four knee surgeries and she said she felt nauseous when she took the bandages off after each one. After about an hour the queasiness passed and it's been fine ever since.
Off to sit on the sofa and wonder when I fell asleep because there's something different on TV than there was five minutes ago. I'm sure that later tonight or tomorrow I'm going to wonder when I wrote this.
Weirdest thing about taking major pain meds is that you do things and seem to be very conscious of doing them and then later you think, "did I do that? If so, when?" because you have just a faint memory of actually doing it. And this is after reducing the dosage from every 6 hours to every 12 hours and taking Advil in between instead. This is why driving would not be a good thing. Well, that and navigating a large automobile seems like way too much effort at the moment.
On the plus side I think the pain in my elbow was definitely worse before the surgery. Now it just hurts in a different way, which either means I'm still jacked up on pain meds or the pain isn't nearly as bad as it was (I'm thinking I'm still jacked up because there has been some decent pain). Sure, there are things I can't do, like lift my hand/arm to my chin or wiggle my fingers, either because my arm doesn't want to do it or it hurts too much but there's a lot I can do that doesn't hurt at all. There's an exercise the doctor wanted me to start yesterday, once the splint came off, that's not so bad. But about that splint coming off. No one told me that taking off all the bandages would make me queasy and light-headed. I mentioned this to my boss today and she apologized for forgetting to tell me. She's had four knee surgeries and she said she felt nauseous when she took the bandages off after each one. After about an hour the queasiness passed and it's been fine ever since.
Off to sit on the sofa and wonder when I fell asleep because there's something different on TV than there was five minutes ago. I'm sure that later tonight or tomorrow I'm going to wonder when I wrote this.
