What if I said no?

The doctor asked me five and a half weeks ago if I could live with the pain. I couldn't really wrap my brain around the question then. Part of that was denial. The pain was not supposed to be there. He was supposed to tell me that it was just inflammation from the surgery. He was absolutely not supposed to tell me the cyst I'd had removed from my spine five weeks earlier was growing back.

So when he asked the question, "Can you live with this pain?" I couldn't stop flashing on how bad the pain had been before surgery to assess where the pain was in that particular moment. And I couldn't think about saying "no" -- because what would no mean? Would no mean that I would kill myself over the pain?

Weeks later, the pain has gotten worse. The last week has seen the return of the searing sensation in my lower leg. It has been waking me up. And the pattern is the same. I awaken and there is a peaceful moment -- when I'm aware of being awake, but I'm enjoying the pleasure of my bed, but as soon as I move, the pain builds and I have to get up -- usually whimpering while I do it. It's not that I can't live with a couple of shortened nights of sleep (I have two kids -- I've done it), but now I'm playing the doctor's question through the lens of my daily life.... Can I live with never sleeping more than 4 hours at a stretch? That is where I was for more than a month before my surgery. Can I live with not being able to sit through an entire meeting? Can I live with cutting my students short and shooing them out the door so I can stop trying to hide my hurt?

When the pain first appeared, I tried so hard to ignore it. The first time, during a meeting, that I had to stand to relieve the leg pain, I felt such defeat. I could see the downward slope ahead of me.

I'm no longer standing at the top of that slope. And it is worse because I know where this is going. I was here so recently. And I know that I can't parent, I can't grade or write, I can't concentrate when I have to hold my body so carefully and so intentionally all the time.

Right now, I am achingly tired, but I can't go to bed. It is too early. I'll be up at three, even with narcotics (but the narcotics will help me get to 3am quite nicely). In moments like these, I can almost see myself saying "no" to the doctor. No, I can't live with this. But that leaves me in a place that might be scarier than the pain.

The Post that Should Not Be

Why the silence? Because the cyst is back. And that is not how it is supposed to be. The jury is still out on why Hank, Jr. is there -- but the MRI done 5 weeks post surgery and the pain that re-emerged around 3-4 weeks post-surgery indicate that something is there -- something about 1/4 the size of the original Hank. So now we wait. Wait and see what an MRI in late March says. And then we talk about 1)living with the pain, 2)doing more surgery or 3)things no one has come up with yet. So, for now, I live in limbo and try not to think about it too much but of course I do think about it, esp. on nights like tonight, when the house is quiet and the possibilities so unknown.

What in the world...?

So coming out of the surgery, I keep finding new "things" on my body that I hadn't expected. I realize that I just went through fairly significant surgery, but these surprises have me wondering just how complicated this surgery got and when. Did the doctor leave out many parts of the surgery when he described it to me beforehand or did he have to adjust quite a bit once he had me on the table? Were there more questions I should have asked?

When I woke up, I immediately realized I'd been catheterized. This was very uncomfortable but the nurse explained that the surgery had gone over 5 hours (doc and I had talked about a 2-3 hour surgery), so it was needed.

Next up was the realization that I had a second IV. The nurses disconnected this "large" (nurses description) IV from the drip but left it in "just in case."

I found all these small punctures in the palms of my hands on my wrists. No one had an explanation for them until the next day when someone finally suggested it was where they had run some EMG lines to test my nerves during surgery.

During the evening, the tops of my thighs went numb, especially on my right leg. This was profoundly disorienting since numbness had sent me to docs in the first place, but this was a NEW numbness, and coming off of just having had spine surgery was scary. The docs sort of shrugged this one off, saying I'd been on my belly in one position for a long time and that probably did it. I've waited this out, and it has gone away.

The skin over my hip bones, especially on the right, was irritated, red, raw... another side effect of being draped over pillows and foam blocks to extend my spine on the table, I guess.

Later, in the middle of the night, after I'd been admitted to the hospital, I found all these dried bloody patches in my hair. The nurse shrugged on this one but finally suggested my head had been screwed into a halo during the surgery. Again, news to me.

When the nurse went to remove my IVs so I could come home, we found a second line had been put into my left hand, at the wrist. (That made for a total of 3!).

When I came home, the irritated spot on my right hip turned out to have some sort of filament or splinter in it -- no wonder it was so angry. What had I been dragged across when I was knocked out?

And then last night, I came up from the dark basement where I'd been watching a movie with the kids to find my left hand (in the thumb area) and wrist heavily bruised -- when they hadn't been 2 hours before. This is where that 3rd IV had been hiding. IV site #2 is also a bit bruised all of the sudden.

This is not any sort of interesting post, but I wanted to set down for myself this series of unexpected bits. I hope they are done. I'm ready to scale down the meds (steroids, nerve calming agents, antibiotics, etc.) and stop finding new, strange things that have been done to my body. I'm ready to heal.