I Survived My Surgery... Somewhat.

Hello all, I am sooo happy to finally be back online.  I've missed my online connections and friends.  This is a rough post to be writing because I still can not put my arm on the desk, so I'm typing with my arm raised in the air so it doesn't touch the desk. 

This picture above is me finally "happy" that the nurses were able to get my IV in my hand...  They had so much trouble because I have horrible veins in my right hand.  They tried smacking my hand, they put it in a hot blanket, nothing worked - they even tried in my forearm, so that's when they called in an anesthesia nurse, she was like magic, one poke and the IV was in, with no pain!  As you can see in the picture, my face is quite red from all of the poking and prodding, I was getting stressed out, I was so glad when the IV was finally in.  They then gave me a dose of Versed which I called "magic juice" because it took away my anxiety within minutes.  My surgeon came in and talked to me, then the anesthesiologist came in and he was cool... he explained everything to me in a comical way, which also helped to ease my anxiety.  Then I was ready to rock n' roll...  They wheeled me into the OR and I made a comment that everything was "so shiny".  (I think it was the Versed talking)  Then the anesthesiology nurse gave me some oxygen and told me to take some deep breaths, which I did.  Then he said that he was going to give me the first stage of anesthesia and again to take deep breaths... I took one deep breath, told the nurse that "this stinks" then poof....  I was gone!

This is me after I woke up in recover and was moved to a different area where my husband would be able to be with me.  I'm dopey as hell in this picture, but not feeling any pain at the moment because before they moved me, they injected some really good pain killer stuff into my IV.  As you can see from my fingers, they are already swelling up - by the time I'm done, my hand will be twice the size of my right hand.  I was in this room eating a little bit of applesauce and drinking a bit of water and chomping on ice chips.  Then the nausea set in.  They gave me a Percocet before I left to go home.  Once I got home, Jon helped to get me into my recliner and poof, I puked.  Thank goodness I had the puke bag in hand. 

The first week of my recover was hard as hell...  Every day that passed, the pain increased and I started to itch from the bandages, so by the next Monday I was back at my surgeons office mentioning about the increasing pain and itching.  He removed my bandages and splint and said to come back in a week to have my staples removed.  This is what I looked like once the wrappings were removed.

I still had a lot of limitations - basically no lifting, no pushing, no pulling, no over extending, etc...  At this point, my husband was still getting me dressed and helping me to bathe and my oldest daughter was doing my hair.  My surgeon told me that this is a very hard recover to heal from because he decompressed the nerve and while he was "in there" he saw that my tendon was too tight, so he released that too.  I have been having nerve pain every day, all day since the day of surgery, which is taking a toll on me physically and emotionally.

The day came to have my staples removed.  I asked the doctor to wait an extra week because I was still in so much pain, but he said that I would have more complications if we waited, so he wanted them removed that day.  OH CRAP!  His surgical nurse came in (she's a sweetie) to remove my staples and as she was removing them, I was crying like a baby it hurt sooo bad.  I've given birth 6 times and this pain was right up there with giving birth.  Like I said, I cried through the removal of the staples, I cried on the way home and I cried once I got home, I can't even describe the pain I was feeling at the time.  This is what I ended up looking like.

I am now 3 weeks and 2 days out from surgery and I still endure nerve pain every day not only inside my arm, but I'm still having a lot of pain at my incision site as well.  I am to keep the suture closures on my arm until I see my doctor on August 2nd.  I'm still on Percocets which I'm to stay on until I see him again, then he will change my meds to a non-narcotic pain killer that I will stay on for 3 months.  The recovery process takes about 4 months to completely heal from... and the "best" part of this whole thing...  I get to do this all over again!  I found out that I have the same compressed nerves in my right arm as I had in my left.  So, I'm going to be repeating this surgery once I'm completely healed from this current surgery.

Thanks for reading this far....  I appreciate all of you!

Until next time...