Pus buckets and megaphones

Here’s my 5 PM update (full TT started at 10:30, concluded at 12:45).

Recovery room nurse gave me a lot of pain medication (I think fentanyl and Percocet) so it was not traumatically painful like when I came home from my breast lift. I just took a lovely 2.5 hour nap. However, as predicted by my friend Jane and who did this in 2021 and who is also a surgery physician’s assistant, I’m at the 4 hour mark and it’s beginning to get suspiciously painful. My husband made me laugh on the phone and it felt like someone stabbed my midsection with 1000 rusty knives.

My throat is so sore and I can’t eat anything. Harvest cheddar Sun Chips might be my favorite chip ever and I chew on them but then they just rolling around in my mouth dryly and I can’t swallow.

I’m laying on this padded wedge pillow set that turns my bed into a beach chair and thank God I got it because pillows would not do the job to keep me in the least painful position. Jane told me she slept in a recliner for a week. She also told me that with her medium pain tolerance, she was taking 10 mg of oxy straight and in the beginning not able to wait the full four hours. She had a pain pump, though, which is I think what they used to use and now they have this new anesthetic kind of like long-acting Novacaine that he injected into my abdominal muscles. So I’m hoping mine won’t be as bad. But I am a HUGE whiner (technical term - low pain tolerance).

Basically right now I just feel like I had a double C-section. I will say it’s a little crazy that I’m not in the hospital because I cannot really move. I really need to urinate right now and there’s no way I’m walking to the bathroom till my husband gets home which BTW I swore I would never do (let my husband help me in the bathroom - I’m sorry but he needs to be ignorant of some things even after 13 years of marriage and 4 large babies including a set of 15 pound twins.

Speaking of my babies, they are boys now aged 12, 12, 8 and 5 and they are veeeeeeery much enjoying this. They were rushing out of my room to sneak some games on their laptops and they overheard my husband say something about changing my dressings (and they deduced the changing of dressings would mean revealing of wounds) and the 8yo did a little screeching stop like you see in a cartoon and said “Oh, I gotta see this.”

We ended up not changing the dressings which was a tragedy of great proportion BUT I did let him help with the pus logging so he’s satisfied with himself. When we finished logging the pus (he insisted that we label the measuring device … to distinguish them from other people’s pus buckets I guess?), one of the twins asked me if I really need to log the pus. I guess he was thinking I was just doing it for fun?

See last photo. BTW I went through all the lists in this group and nobody recommended one of these bad boys. They are must have for any mom living in a three-story house and four very loud rambunctious children. I suspect it’s going to come in handy post-op as well.