Note: This post is the follow-up to Surgery.
We received my pre-op instructions the Friday before surgery day to shower twice before the day of with Hibicleanse, stop eating food and drinking non-clear liquids at midnight the night before, and only sip clear liquids until seven-thirty AM the morning of. We were also given our final arrival time: eight AM, updated from our original six AM timeslot that would have had us wake up as early as three-thirty in the morning. Having to be there by eight versus six meant we could sleep in much later than before, and overall made our trip to Chicago and back much more pleasant. Once we arrived, all the staff at the hospital were wonderful, I had a great time with them and my orthopedic specialist before surgery, and I was wheeled out of the pre-op room around ten forty-five en route to the operating room. I woke up in the post-op room after my surgery around twelve forty in the afternoon, and was happily eating a giant sausage pizza roll from the hospital cafeteria less than an hour later downstairs in the recovery room. Hours later, after plenty of room visits, episodes of Castle, and a brief visit from one of their physical therapists who helped me take my first few hops out of bed and showed us a few ways to get me upstairs, we left the hospital around dinner time, and picked up fast food on the way back.
Once we got home and inside, I had a lovely, extended FaceTime call with my grandmother, and in my recovery, I've been filling my newfound spare time conversing on X, playing Crossy Road on my phone and Crossy Road Castle on my old Xbox, and binging a mix of movies and television shows, from The Rookie: Feds to Destination X and America's Got Talent, A Minecraft Movie, Five Nights at Freddy's, and old The Big Bang Theory reruns. More recently into my recovery, I've also been able to make it over to my desk for short periods to play my collection of PC titles, and I've been busy drafting dozens of new blog posts in my head. My pain has actually been surprisingly tolerable from the moment I woke up in Chicago, and my idle pain when I'm just sitting there has been minimal. The only meaningful pain I've experienced has been while shifting positions or trying to put weight on my leg, which has both become almost non-existent as time has gone on. That isn't to say I don't still have pain, but it's much less common and more so when I'm putting too much strain on my leg, especially in weird positions. While awake, getting into a comfortable sitting position is relatively rudimentary for me, but sleeping has been a completely different story. For the first couple of weeks, I could only lie comfortably in a couple of hyper-specific positions, but even now, there's still a delicate art to getting and staying comfortable in my cast while horizontal. I've primarily been getting around the house by hopping with my walker, though in the past week or so, I have been able to start taking some small steps here and there. Also in the past week, I've been dealing with increasingly powerful and relentless itches inside my cast that have been incredibly difficult to alleviate. One of the recommendations we were given to deal with itching was to use a cold hair dryer to blow air into the cast, but we haven't had much success with that.
I would say the worst part of my forced staycation, aside from the occasional random outbursts of pain, is the significant hampering of what I can do, when I can do it, and where I can go, as well as my inability to be out, interacting in the world. I haven't been outside since surgery day, and inside, my travels haven't gone much farther than the living room. With that in mind, in the weekends leading up to surgery day, we kept busy attending a Dierks Bentley concert with my aunt, spending quality family time in downstate Illinois with my grandmother, and watching the sunsets with our family friends up at their Wisconsin lakehouse. With the exception of the concert, it's a pretty standard summer calendar for us, although I will admit this is the first time we've packed the festivities in so tightly. Regardless, the hospital staff weren't impressed when I said we hadn't been up to much.
The first time I stepped outside the house post-surgery was on the sixteenth to tag along while my parents coordinated bringing one of my father's dump trucks to the repair shop. It wasn't by my choice, but we did go out to dinner at Chili's afterwards for the first time in a long while. Not that I would've stayed home for much longer after that, as the following day, I had to go to a follow-up doctor's appointment with my neurologist. As for physical therapy, I had my first appointment on the twenty-third, where I was given some simple exercises to do with my leg until I can properly begin therapy once my cast gets cut off on August 13.