This past week of recovery has been marked with ups and downs (as, I guess, most weeks are :-). There is a huge difference in my mobility from last Monday to today. Huge. A week ago I was still bound to my walker. Today I am walker-free and cane-free 100% of the day. My left leg just started working for me overnight in the middle of last week and now has an almost-normal stride. My walking "gate" has gone from a shuffle, to a waddle, to now a nearly even stride. I'm still slow as molasses, but I'm okay with that because the difference in my mobility in just one week is between night and day and I'm very thankful for that.
The issues have been with itching, hot-flashes, and then my incision had problems as the cherry on top. After I got my staples out my incision went crazy with itching. I couldn't put anything on top of it because I had steri strips on top but I did find out that taking orignal formula Benedryl addressed the itching well. The Benedryl on top of my pain meds really zombied me out, but at least I wasn't going crazy with itching. Another issue I didn't expect was hot-flashes. I don't think I've written about this yet, but I had been having surges of hot-flashes that covered me in sweat followed by chills. I searched health boards and found it to be not uncommon for women to experience this after a major surgery. My surgeon confirmed today that the hotflashes are a normal recovery effect.
The most stressful has been my incision. On Friday night, in the middle of the night, I noticed that my incision started to drain. We are thankful for our awesome neighbors who took the kids for us for the morning and Michael took me into acute care. We found that it was draining and that the incision had opened up a bit. They gauzed me up and gave me a prescription for antibiotics for a possible infection. I returned to my surgeon today and he had to inject some numbing stuff into the incision and then stitch me up again. He had to cut away some of the scar tissue as well so tonight I'm left feeling sore. Thankfully the rest of the incision is healing well.
I've been in a bad mood all day so I'm thankful my mom is here to help me out with the kids and friends have been dropping food off at the house. I'm thankful for that....even when we have people staying with us it's hard to keep up with the kids, my needs for recovery, the house....it's all a bit overwhelming right now.
But the best news is that I'm walking so, so much better that I know I need to hold on to that awesome victory.
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