Life Came At Me Fast

July 21, 2006

Hello All!

I am out of the hospital now, and back home in Scottsdale. I am updating this blog for the first time since before my surgery! It feels good to be home but I tell you, my experience has been so “institutional” it will definitely take me time to settle in.

Let me start by thanking each one of you who wrote back via this blog, sent a card, or called. The love and support J and I received during this ordeal has been miraculous. Thanks to all, from the very bottom of my heart.

I would like to start out by saying my surgeons, Drs. H, K and Z, are top notch sawbones. They truly know their stuff, and there is no question their skills saved my life. I have seen them all since he surgery. They all think I am doing fine, and could live as long as I normally would have before this.

I got my surgical staples removed yesterday, along with the stitches. This is great, because it was very unpleasant to roll around in bed with staples throughout my body. No position was comfortable.

I will tell you a little about the procedure now. Honestly, if you would have asked me what my recovery was going to be like after cancer surgery, I never would have guessed the ordeal I have gone through. Even the finest of hospitals is an institution, and nothing even close to comfortable.

I remember very little about the day and immediate days surrounding my surgery. What I do remember is finding out after surgery some of the unpleasant side effects of surgery. I was not at all prepared for the temperature of my recovery room. It seems it is standard procedure to keep a patient’s room over 90 degrees after vascular surgery. The heat keeps the blood flowing to the new tissue. Surprise! For four days after a major brain operation, I was in a room from 90-100 degrees.

The single most unpleasant side effect to this very moment is that my right foot is completely asleep. My head does not hurt, nor my neck nor my leg where they harvested my tissue. My foot, however, feels like an elephant stood on it for about a day, and it does not get better. This, according to my surgeons, is a normal side effect (again, news to me). What causes this is the nerve damage caused by harvesting tissue from my right leg. Sure, it will heal in time (months), but the severed nerves in the mean time make my foot feel asleep, and my toes are freezing!

After about seven days at the Mayo Clinic, I was shipped off to a third party rehabilitation facility in Scottsdale. I am not sure how they would define themselves but it seems to me their job is to take post surgery or major procedure patients and see to it they can return home. This facility is where I have been for the past week.
The patients here were old mostly, averaging about 75 years plus I’d say. I was the youngest patient I saw there at the age of 37. I was kind of a hit because of my age and the extent of my injuries. Many of the other patients were there for a broken hip or diabetes amputation or something but I was the only post-cancer patient I knew of. I truly started to feel very old (and a little crazy, too), just by virtue of the company I kept. There was one poor old lady who constantly and loudly cried “Lord, help me” the whole time she was there, which after a while was a little unsettling.

Now that I am home, the thing to do is to try to re-settle back into a routine. The injury to my leg will only get better with time, so there is no need for me to really truly do anything except wait. The thing which gets to me is how taxing it is to be up and around. I love to play with S so much, but within minutes, I am exhausted. As well, doing anything mentally draining is difficult. Updating this blog has taken several rounds of trial and error, with me lying down between paragraphs. I hope I can bounce back.

I will close for now, as I anticipate J coming home from the store with prescriptions and a beer, and the sun going down enough for m to enjoy our hot tub!