Day 16 Post-op

Woke up in a lot of pain this morning, we went for a short walk last night to a restaurant that was close, our first real meal out.

I was OK for a while but sitting there did start to get the better of me after the first hour, even with 2 glasses of red wine in me.  So this morning I am sore, which I can live with, have back muscles that are complaining, Tim worked on them, but the worst pain is my guts. Even with my brace on they feel like they are falling out.

They really hurt. I assume they will take longer to heal than usual as they were moved around twice. Just a colonoscopy can set your guts complaining for quite a while if they so choose and they really HATE being moved around. There’s a lot of connective tissue holding all those coils of guts together, some of it gets broken or pulled apart during the surgery.  Some of the coils don’t go back into the same place as before and they protest. Some of the coils get bruised as does all the connective tissue.

Then there’s the stomach and everything else within the peritoneal sack that the surgeon moves out of the way to get to the disks.  That sack gets help out of the way for 3 or 4 hours and probably has to be moved often to get to each disk.

Then of course there’s the second surgery that night (which thankfully is rare) where they went in and had to dig around in there to find the second bleed, talk about adding injury to insult. And I can tell you they feel not only injured but sorely insulted ;o)

Gonna fill up with pain killers today and see if I can get moving again and hopefully things will settle back down.

When I am out of pain I dream of running again, hiking, swimming, camping, you name it.  When I have days like this I’m just thinking it would be nice to be able to turn over in bed without groaning. As I said before, 3 steps forwards, 1 back occasionally.  Each day is moving forward regardless and I know I’ll get there.  No pain No gain. I just have to remember that debilitating back pain I was living with and know that this too will pass and I will get my life back. Baby steps………..

Here’s a couple of X-rays of my new bionic back:

Three New M6-L Titanium Disks