Home and Resting

I've been home since Sunday and it feels great. There's nothing like a week in the hospital to make you appreciate how great sleeping in your own bed is and marching to the beat of your own drum. No more 6 am wake ups by doctors and phlebotomists' searching for a good vein to draw blood while I'm half asleep. Now it's back to fighting with my cat every morning while he insists on marching across my stomach until he finds the right spot to lay.

The physical adjustment hasn't been so hard. It's pretty much what I expected from my other surgeries when I had a big incision. My surgeon used only half of my previous abdominal scar to open me up so I guess my pain should actually be less. I also have two new tiny spots where she put a laproscopic-like camera in there. Those don't hurt much at all. I do have a lot of pain on my right side where my stoma is. I think that area of my intestines is inflamed a bit from the surgery even though my surgeon actually didn't need to adjust the stoma itself at all. How she did this is still confusing to me. The whole damn thing is confusing to be honest.

A lot of people, after surgeries or doctors appointments, seem to say "my doctor said it's the worst case he'd ever seen" or something along those lines. So I won't even go there about my surgeons impressions of my insides once she got in there. Of course she did say my colon was very much inflamed and I had multiple fistulas in my rectum, which we already knew. A couple of interesting things were that she didn't even think I had much of my colon left. Even though I only had half of it removed back in '04, she said sometimes your colon can actually shrink from inflammation and scar tissue. Weird, huh? Also, there was an area of my small bowel that adhered to my large. She didn't think it was a fistula (which was a concern of my dr's that was ruled out through multiple imaging tests) but said that it couldn't be ruled out 100%.

Otherwise, my appetite has improved a lot since I've been home, too. I still get full easily but I'm eating and enjoying it. I really don't have any dietary restrictions but I am still hesitant about eating vegetables and other things that aggravated me before surgery. Honestly the most annoying thing right now is that I have a drain coming from my butt that I'll have until next week. My surgeon decided, because of my terrible rectal inflammation, that the safe thing to do would be to leave the drain in for a few weeks to make sure nothing became infected. So I've got this long tube that drains into a grenade-looking plastic container and I've got to drag it around with me everywhere I go. If I don't hold it when I'm walking then it pulls on the stitches in my bottom and hurts just a bit. So I'm not completely free yet but I am getting there.

That's all my news for now. I've been spending the days with my mom and nephew, whom I can't pick up for 4 weeks :( I am just trying to relax as much as possible so I can be back to my old activities in no time. Life has been pretty boring these past five days, and that's just how I like it.