It's not even the incisions...

So I had the surgery yesterday, and my babymaker no longer functions as-intended. Win.

It was surprisingly low-key, considering my anxiety.

I did find out I've lost even more weight, though.. I'm down to 108# from my usually-consistent 123#, a situation which I find quite upsetting; eating more means more pain due to my ongoing tummy problems, and not eating more means I could easily become even less healthy.. I'll have to talk to my primary care doctor about it when I call regarding depo, especially since I think I may have pinned down the cause. On the plus side, my distress over actually losing weight seems to have convinced my partner that, no, despite my jokes about "working off that meal", I'm not actually interested in losing weight, just maintaining the same size I've been since middle school (which I do usually without conscious thought. I don't go out of my way to stay the same size; I don't weigh myself or measure or anything, and most of my waistbands are elastic so I have no reference other than visual).

Anyway..

My attending nurse was also childless and had a hysterectomy, and totally understood when I said I was only getting my tubes tied because they wouldn't let me have my uterus removed. She had hers done by laproscope, just like mine, so although it was a bigger surgery, she knew what I could expect, more or less.

She was super good about my intense sarcasm, and was surprised by my unwavering bluntness (it's just who I am, and I rather like it, because nobody ever has to guess about me, and get it wrong).

She commented positively on my lack of moving even slightly, despite watching what she was doing, when she attempted the IV in my right hand, and wrist, and when I told her she was better off, despite appearances to the contrary, using my left, I didn't flinch for that, either, and she got it on the first go. My viens are strange; on the right, they are very visible and look perfect for tapping, but can almost never be hit.. On my left, they look less amazing, and are harder to see, but can be hit on the first go just about every single time (as in.. I've yet to have even folks in training miss on that side)

Then I explained that I was keeping track of my age with piercings, and had gotten a bunch through the years that I didn't keep. It all made sense. She was super apologetic about missing twice, and my response was merely "eh, I figured it would happen, but it doesn't bother me much at all".

My partner sat with me while we waited, and we watched one of the new spiderman movies from start to finish, so that was a really good way of keeping my mind off what was to come, but honestly, the IV was the worst bit of pre-surgery.

One of the other nurses gave me a hard time about my dermal anchors, even with the tops removed, and finally I was like "well, for what it's worth, I regret them, and I would take them out if that didn't require a surgery all on it's own.." She then demanded to know how they got them in, and I told her the rather unpleasant process of making 3 piercings to make a pocket, and slipping the jewelry in, letting the skin grow through the back of the anchor. I told her how long ago I got them, and that they had finally stopped, for the most part, giving me major problems, and she cooled down a bit and explained how cauterizing can lead to burns, especially with a surgery so close to them. I told her I appreciated the info, and that it was a risk I simply had to be willing to take, at this point. That seemed to be enough. There's not much I can do about something I did 5 years ago, short of, as mentioned, surgery.. the anchors need to be cut out, and the process is much worse than implanting them (that process, by the by... sucks..)

They wheeled me into the OR, and I was still awake so I was asking all sorts of questions about the equipment. They showed me a few devices that they were going to use on me, and I told them I liked that they were willing to share and explain. They responded that it's not all that often someone wants to know, beforehand, what's going on for surgery. They have this cool reflex tester deal that they put on your hand to send shocks through to make sure everything is working. They wouldn't hook it up while I was awake, which is a shame, because now I'm super curious how it feels.

Nobody got my joke about the machine that goes "BING!" from Monty Python, which was disappointing, but I asked if they were going to be rocking out to any awesome jams, and the guy in charge of the OR laughed and said "not in my OR", to which the nurses laughed and said "but as soon as he leaves the room!!!"

My mom was an RN, and worked in nearly ever field an RN can; OR, ER, prenatal, maternity, pre-op, assisted living, nursing home, the lot. She used to tell me about how they worked, and how they rocked out to music while the patient was under. She also used to comment about how much she hated the rude people, so I did my best to be entirely accommodating, even a bit helpful.

I don't really recall them injecting the anesthetic, but I recall asking what specific drug it was (as I did with everything else they put in it, because I'm curious) and we got to skip right over that boring counting stuff, because they had the perfect stuff (medical equipment and knowledge) to keep me happy and non-stressed.

I woke up in agony. They gave me a few shots of painkillers, but it didn't come close to going away.. it got better, for sure, but nothing near relief.

It was very unpleasant. The gasses they used to blow up my abdomen lingered like crazy. I still have some huge major bubbles and a ton of subsurface tiny bubbles, and they still hurt. Because of the added pressure in strange places, my back and shoulders also hurt.

When the pain subsided somewhat, they wheeled me into my recovery room where my partner was waiting for me. Then there was a boring bit while I just laid there and made him give me water every few minutes, between conversation and a lot of complaining.

While I was in recovery, my surgeon came by to check on me, let me know that the surgery went well, and said he thought I might be interested to see my clips, since I'm a strange patient. Turns out, he made me a nice, glossy, full-color copy of the pictures, and presented them to me with a flourish. I, being the strange duck that I am, was thrilled. I asked all about what I was seeing, and now I have a picture of each ovary, my Fallopian tubes, and both clips. You can't ask for more! I might frame them. Proof that I'm sterile.

They wanted me to stick around until I could use the bathroom (they apparently used a catheter), and I wanted to leave because we still had a 2.5 hour drive home, so I managed well before I needed or wanted to go, and that, too, was highly unpleasant.

The drive home sort of sucked, although I think I passed out for an hour or so, because when we got to what I thought was Fond Du Lac, we were actually in Oshkosh (30-45 min difference). Bumpy roads were painful, and I curled up in the back seat for a while trying to relocate some of the gas bubbles (something I'm very accustomed to doing with intestinal gas).

The only bad thing, so far, other than the pain.. was the bleeding. They used some sort of liquid bandage sealant stuff rather than bandages, but one of the incisions didn't close up completely, so in the car, it started oozing blood. Unpleasant. We had to stop and look for paper towel, but there wasn't any at the rest stop, so I fished an old but clean shirt out of my trunk and used that. Not ideal, but workable.

The gas pain has been bothering me since I woke up from surgery, but I found that increasing blood flow increases absorption rate of CO2 gas (the same way as muscle fatigue) so I did some exercises that didn't hurt, but would increase my heart rate slightly, as well as increase the blood flow to abdominal muscles. It seemed to help with some of it, but there's enough left that I think it will be another day or two yet, at least. I'm trying not to limit my normal activities too much, since couch-potato-ing decreases blood flow and thus increases recovery time.

I'm also trying to find a cat to sit on my lap and purr, but none of them seem to want to be that close to my blood. (I'm not forcing the matter, of course, but my invitations have been ignored thusfar)
Why would I want a cat so close? Simply, the cat's purr is special; it vibrates at a frequency that can speed up healing, which is why cats seem to survive things you'd think would kill them. The frequencies (~25 htz for the base frequency and ~50 for the first harmonic frequency) have been shown in lab settings to promote healing of bones, reduce inflammation and swelling, and reduce pain, to say nothing of the illness rates in cats being significantly lower than would be expected. It works so well that devices are being made based on the cat purr frequencies for healing bones that are having problems doing so naturally (such as old or compromised patients)

All told, I'm still glad I did it. This is a reasonably small price to pay for peace of mind. I now know, almost for certain, that I will never need to have an abortion.

And such excellent timing, too; if my partner wants to be around babies, especially now that he knows for sure we aren't having any, his niece just found out she was about 5 weeks pregnant, so that need, if it becomes a need, has an outlet. I even told him he's welcome to babysit if he wants to, which was met by the most vigorous head shake of no I've ever seen from him. It was magical.

Sorry for rambling; I'm a bit drugged  up for this post. They offered me vicodin and codine, and I declined both because they never work for me (I literally cannot tell when I've taken them or haven't, and I have some skill in those matters), so they sent me home with 600MG ibuprofin and 5mg oxy/35mg acetaminophen. Today is an oxy day.

Perhaps I'll have something more to write when I'm a bit more sober. Perhaps I'll sleep all day. :p

Pre-surgery jitters

Well, tomorrow I have my surgery..

I'm, shockingly, not looking forward to it, although I am looking forward to the outcome.

I'm supposed to give up food and drink at midnight tonight, but I've given up food already, as of 11 PM yesterday. Why? Simply, although the "do not eat or drink" thing is for anesthesia, so you don't throw up while under, my digestive system doesn't work that happily.

I gave up food early do I'm not already filled with gasses before they even start. It's enough that they will be inflating my abdomen with CO2, there's no need for me to add my own ~_^

Having a calm, relaxed tummy for this is a high priority; I'm going to feel pookey enough afterwards without the gut-wrenching agony of bloating. But it's more than that... I want my tummy to quickly return to normal, because I have to remove the tops of my dermal anchors.. I've had nothing but problems with those fuckers, and honestly, I'm concerned that I'll have one sink and get lost if my tummy spends too much time bloated, putting pressure on the implanted bit. At the very least, I expect I will have a good 2-4 weeks of irritation healing on at least a couple of my dermals.. Most likely the ones at the bottom..

It's a problem I already have with the bloating thing, and not one I wish to make worse.

As it is I plan to draw circles around the piercings so my surgeon knows exactly where to avoid, if at all possible; most medical personnel aren't terribly familiar with implanted piercings, and they all want to know "can you take them out?"  nooooo... pretty sure that's why they are called implants..

The rest of the surgery stuff.. meh.. I have transportation arranged, and I'm not too terribly concerned with pain. I do plan to ask for something better than Vicodin or codine, since neither of those do anything whatever to my system.. They seriously might as well be placebo for all the good they do... Placebos might actually work better, because you don't expect them to do anything, so any result is a pleasant surprise!

I guess it's good that my biggest concern for this surgery.... is whether or not it will fuck up my very touchy piercings.

That's a minor thing, overall.

And I get to come home to the two most adorable red point Siamese boys, so that certainly helps!

Trading in Problems

WARNING - this post discusses GI functionality. I will do my best to avoid any graphic language, but be aware. You have been warned.

For as long as I can remember, I've had tummy problems. Actually, that's not strictly true; for most of my life, my tummy problems were transitory, came and went depending on my diet. A number of years ago, possibly around the time of my military service, but I could be mistaken, everything changed.

Suddenly, I was getting cramping, bloating, and motility issues.  I thought, for sure, it was the large quantities of milk I was drinking every day, because when I stopped, so did my tummy problems. Lactose sensitivity was, I believe, only the beginning, because when I cut dairy from my diet, the problems went away for a while, but then came back just as strong.

It got to the point where nothing I eat sits well. Within a handful of hours of eating, my tummy blows up like a balloon, so I now only eat at night, knowing that at least if I'm asleep, I don't have to try to do anything when my tummy pain is at it's worst.  I was diagnosed with IBS-C, which I will leave to you to look up if you are not familiar.

IBS isn't so much a diagnosis as an acknowledgement of distress. There's no known cause, no known cure, and the treatments are lifestyle and amazingly strict dietary changes that severely impact quality of life, assuming they even work (for many, including myself, they do not). Additionally, IBS is more of a compilation of symptoms than an actual condition, as the criterion for it are quite broad and overlap with numerous other, known, conditions. Frankly I think it's a cop out; patient gets a diagnosis, which is all some of them want, but that's it. Once you have an IBS diagnosis, that's more or less where your guided treatment (with doctors) ends, because most of them have absolutely no clue what to do, and yes, that does include, for the most part, GI specialists.

So I started doing my own research on the symptoms I experience, and I brought this info to my doctors, both to get their opinion of it, and see if there was any way they could help. Mind, I'm not getting paid to do their job for them, but I certainly should be. I'm not entirely negative on doctors, but I'm absolutely balls-to-the-wall frustrated by their lack of giving a shit. I realize that there are a plethora of new ailments these days, likely caused by the industrial lifestyle we live today, and that's difficult to keep up with and all, but when your doctor asks, every visit, "Where would you like to see your treatment go? What do you think would help? Is there any treatment you'd like to try?" it really emphasizes that they aren't doing any looking on their own. Isn't that what doctors are supposed to want to do? Learn how to help their patients find relief, even if it means doing a bit of *gasp* continued education? After all, a doctor who has done the bare-minimum professional development (continued learning) will be out-of-date on a lot of info, and the longer they have been practicing, the more outdated their information becomes.

It's not my job to be a doctor, to do a buttload of research, to suggest my own treatment. I don't know what I'm doing, medically, but because I find the topic quite interesting, and go out of my way to learn about biology and medicine, I probably know a lot more than the average person. I shudder to think what the average person goes through when they hear something like that, especially if they don't have the innate drive to research that I have developed. I believe this is a symptom of a larger problem; it goes along with drug companies marketing direct to uninformed consumers, rather than to doctors, as they should, and are required to do in many parts of the world where direct-to-consumer drug marketing is banned. They are relying on people with no knowledge of biochemistry, hormones, anatomy, organ interactions, etc etc etc, to request their drug based on misleading commercials. And people do exactly that. Because the commercial tells them to talk to their doctor about it, when the doctor should be talking to them about it. That whole system is a disaster-mess, and it's WRONG. Wrong and harmful, depressing, alarming, and it makes the patient feel worthless. If their doctor doesn't even care enough to suggest another treatment, the patient must be complaining too much, or have a problem the doctor doesn't care to solve.

Consider it this way; you are having a house built. You hire an architect to design the building, which turns out to be very complicated structurally, even though from the outside, it looks fairly simple. Something goes awry, and you notice a problem with the structure, and you point out the problem to your architect. Said architect then asks you what you think should be done about it, and you have the pleasure of learning all about construction to answer, because said architect will do no research for you. Even though that's exactly what they get paid for, and they know more about it than you do. More likely, you get upset and fire the shitty architect. You wouldn't stand for that sort of treatment, yet this is exactly what happens every day with doctors across the country, and it's horrifying. They aren't all like that, but enough of them are for it to be a major problem.

I have gotten little help from doctors on my IBS problems, so of course I looked for any dietary factors that could help, and I hit on beneficial bacteria. Now, I know that probiotic supplementation isn't likely to cure long-term problems, so I went into it expecting little. I used kefir for my probiotics, both milk and water varieties, and cultured my own with grains I bought on amazon for $12. Kefir contains 10+ (actual number varies from one set of grains to the next, depending on what they are fed) strains of bacteria and yeasts per type of culture, and the residents of milk kefir are different from those in water kefir. OTC and Rx probiotics contain 1-5 strains in much smaller quantities, and I'm a cheapskate.

I was surprised. I still have major tummy problems, the gas and bloating are still entirely present, as are the abdominal cramps, but joyously, I have switched sides from IBS-C to IBS-D. Believe me, the latter is easier to deal with. Unfortunately, the problems I have remaining seem to be something like SIBO, although I strongly doubt it's a bacteria overgrowth; more likely it's a candida -yeast- overgrowth, since yeasts produce copious amounts of gasses. I'm not yet entirely certain how to deal with this, but new information comes out about digestive problems rather frequently, so perhaps it won't be long.

In the course of this swap, however, I seem to have lost 13 lbs. I've never, in my life, lost 13 lbs; since the time I started wrestling at about 14 -when I went from 115 lbs and 21% body fat to 119 lbs and 14% body fat- I've been within 4 lbs of 123. I'm reasonably active; I run full-speed up and down the stairs in my house multiple times through the course of my day, lift and shift heavy objects regularly, including 5-gallon buckets of water for my aquariums, etc. I eat mostly healthy, home-cooked food (my partner cooks for me; he's wonderful-I'm not a great cook.) and nothing, as far as I am aware, has changed except how long food stays in my system. Oh, and I cut out some sugar from my diet (by "diet" I mean "coffee"), because holy fuck is that stuff bad for you. Seriously, sugar, in the quantities we consume these days, is toxic. But I don't think cutting a minor amount of sugar from a diet that already contains very little (except I do love my fruit and occasional candy) would have done this.

So now I have a conundrum; If I eat more, I get the pleasure of more frequent pain. If I don't, I may lose too much weight to be healthy.

What would you do, in this position?