Recovering from Surgery
I’m starting this blog on my first day of chemotherapy treatment, but in the interests of chronicling my whole experience, I’m writing a few posts that go “back in time”. I’ll try to present things as clearly as I can remember them. Given that this has all happened over the last few months, that shouldn’t be too hard. Also, I’m writing about colon cancer, which means that from time to time, I’ll be referencing things that I otherwise wouldn’t talk about in polite company (stool samples, bowel function, etc.). Fair warning…
After I was finally released from the hospital, things were actually pretty easy at home. It’s amazing how comfortable your own bed and couch feel after being in a hospital bed for five days. Add to that the fact that you don’t have an IV needle in your arm (or hand), and it’s bliss.
I had planned to be off from work for three weeks after my surgery to recover, and when I was planning to be out I couldn’t really envision being at home and not in contact with work at all for that amount of time. I’d probably want to check email every once in a while and make sure that everything was okay, right? Nope. I truly stayed unplugged, and I think that was a good thing.
The first week that I was home, I was tired and moving around very slowly. I was comfortable when I was lying down or standing up, but the transitions between the two were awkward and a little uncomfortable – not shooting pain or anything, but enough twinges of pain that I was careful when I was getting up or lying down. I spent a lot of time lying down, and dozed off into naps from time to time, partly due to pain meds that I was still taking. This then really messed with my sleep schedule, so I often found myself up until 2 or 3 AM, and then sleeping until 10 or 11 AM… or, let’s be honest, 12 or 1 PM. I didn’t have to go to work the next day, so it wasn’t a problem, but after a week or two, it was a little strange how off my hours were.
Towards the end of the first week/beginning of the second week, I didn’t need to take any prescription pain meds any more (percocet, which is basically oxycodone and tylenol), and was just taking tylenol periodically if I needed it, which was mostly later in the day, especially if I’d been moving around a lot.
They (the doctors, nurses, etc.) want you moving around as much as you can. Like my pacing the hallway in the hospital, this started with me just getting off the couch several times a day and walking around my house – doing laps from my kitchen to the living room and back again, pausing to pet the cat as I walked by her favorite spot to perch, from which she was watching me closely. Under normal circumstances if I was on the couch she’d be in my lap, so she’d had to make some adjustments while I (or, at least, my lap) recovered.
When you’re sent home from the hospital, you get a packet of discharge instructions, and it covers a lot of detail, but the one thing that is left incredibly vague is diet. I was told that I didn’t have any dietary restrictions, but that I’d want to “take it slow” with eating normal food: eat smaller meals and milder foods to start with, and work my way back up to complex/spicy/interesting food.
This sounds fine in theory, but it leads to a guessing game and we really wished that there’d been some food guide that got handed to us instead: something that laid out a suggested diet plan for the first week or two. That would have been incredibly helpful. While I didn’t have any bad reactions to food, every time I added something back into my diet I was wondering whether I would have a bad reaction to it.
For the first few days, I did keep it simple: scrambled eggs and toast, plain pasta… things like that. After three or four days I had some plain chicken and rice, a tuna fish sandwich, and started moving onward from there. Most resources we found online suggested not overdoing it on the amount of fiber, so I actually had white bread for the first time in years. I’d forgotten how amazing white bread is. It’s like the best thing since… well, you know.
The thing that I was warned about before the surgery was that it might take a while (weeks to a couple of months) before my bowel function was back to normal. My surgeon told me that this could mean anything from having looser stools for a while, having to go to the bathroom more frequently, having to go to the bathroom less frequently, or something else completely. It’s one of those places where all they can say is that it’s different for everyone.
Before the surgery, this part of the recovery had me pretty worried. I think that most of us take going to the bathroom “normally” pretty much for granted, and I wasn’t looking forward to several weeks to two months of it being “off” in some way. Thankfully, I was pretty lucky and things started working and feeling “normal” pretty much after the first week or two home.
Prior to my surgery I was connected to a friend of a friend who’d been through the same surgery about five years ago and got a chance to ask him for any advice/thoughts based on his experience. He told me that your body pretty much tells you what it’s ready for, and as long as you don’t push to hard and overdo it, the recovery is pretty smooth. He was right. As the days went by I started to feel a little better, and I’d do a little more: go for walks, drive to the grocery store, go into the grocery store, wear something other than pajamas (a prerequisite for me before going to the grocery store, despite what I see some other people wear there), go out to dinner, etc.
For me, three weeks at home was enough time to feel good enough to go back to work. And so I did.
