post-op

• About 600ml of fluid (" a kind of dirty colour", said the doc) was drained from the cyst on Friday.

• I spent seven hours at the hospital and had to be wheeled to the exit in a wheelchair as I could still barely walk by then.
• The doc rang me at home later and in the course of the conversation, called me "mate".
• I like that in a gynaecologist.
• This was my fifth general anaesthetic, not to mention the caesarian-by-epidural, and all of these surgical procedures concerned my reproductive organs.
• Nevertheless, I still think of myself as an intrinsically healthy person.
• [Should I be reassessing my self-image?]
• The male nurse in recovery was gay - he and the female nurse (sexual orientation not obvious) referred to co-parent as my "girlfriend".
• It felt very cheery to have a girlfriend rather than a partner.
• I have three bandaids covering the three keyholes on my tummy. Beneath each is at least one stitch.
• My tummy isn't as hard as it was pre-op but it's still swollen.
• I'd forgotten that when you have a laparoscopy they pump gas into your abdomen to separate the organs/intestines and afterwards the gas rises up through your torso and hits your collarbones and hurts a lot.
• So every time you bend over, your collarbones hurt, which is weird considering it was ovarian surgery.
• We went to see Billy Elliot [it was fabulous] [we'd already paid for expensive tickets so I couldn't not go] yesterday afternoon and I cried in every part that featured his dead mother. (I probably would have cried regardless of the past week.)
• I'm reading The Sword in the Stone to Olle and this morning we came to the part where they go out on a boar hunt. "There were five long minutes during which nothing happened. The hearts beat thunderously in the circle and a small vein on the side of each neck throbbed in harmony with each heart. The heads turned quickly from side to side, as each one assured himself of his neighbours, and the breath of life steamed away on the north wind most sweetly as each realised how beautiful life was..." [I concede that the fact they were about to kill an animal somewhat undercuts the emotion of this scene, but I cried anyway.]
•  It's a fabulous book, highly recommended.
• And so I wasn't surprised to discover that TH White was 'a person of interest'.

Comments

[CW]

I hope all the incisions/keyholes heal quickly and that you're not in too much discomfort!

Re the Sword in the Stone, I haven't read it - it's now on To Read list :)

[lauredhel]

Oh, get well soon!

For what it's worth (and it's possible my humour-meter is just miscalibrated), the air travels up under the diaphragm, rather than right up through the chest. The collarbone/shoulder-tip referred pain is a result of embryological phrenic-nerve happenstance.

(I find myself endlessly fascinated (and often horrified) by olde-timee descriptions of these things. eg http://jn.physiology.org/cgi/pdf_extract/3/2/175 )

[Laura]

I imagined cysts were quite small things so 600ml sounds like a lot of fluid.

The Once and Future King was give to me by my grandfather when I was about ten and I loved that book so much, didn't really understand much of parts of it, but The Sword in the Stone was the perfect book for that age. A few years later I came across Mistress Masham's Repose by White also, if Olle's keen for another in the same fantasy vein it could be good. Lilliputans living in a tumbledown pavilion in an English garden.

White wrote a sequel to Pride and Prejudice that I would love to read but it's unobtainable.

[Helen]

Glad you came through the surgery OK, Suz!

Read the Sword in the Stone several times as a kid - LOVED the apprenticeship parts where Wart was learning to be an owl, a fish, etc. Funnily enough, the two subsequent volumes were very longwinded in comparison, and not very interesting as I remember; Should try again.

[Kirsten]

Oh wow, I have been very out of touch. So glad that it wasn't a clot, wasn't a sinister cyst, and is now gone! I guess it's a bit late to hope you recover quickly (I remember the horrid effect of that gas - not nice), but nonetheless I hope all is now well - and i guess you are in England by now, living it up. Enjoy!