Feeling like a million.....something

I love surgery, if for no other reason than it’s all over with so quickly. Mine took what, like 5 minutes? Or at least from my perspective it did. Actually about 4 ½ hours, but who’s counting? Me, I get to chit-chat, get put under, then wake up almost instantaneously with new boobage. What’s not to like?

After being in recovery for a couple of hours, I get wheeled over to Feinberg via a tunnel under the city streets that’s about a mile long. It’s as all tunnels are: dark, cold, water dripping down the sides, moss and lichen growing in the corners, the squeal of things best left unknown…….oh, okay, it’s actually as bright and chipper as the rest of the place, dammit. And what fun is that??

Anyway considering that I’ve just had major surgery and am chock full of tubes, drains, stitches, etc., I feel pretty damn good! Chattering away like a magpie, feelin’ fine……I didn’t realize until later, when things started to go downhill, that this was the drugs talking. Yep, it’s amazing what heavy anesthesia will do to a person. I even feel fine when Debbie stops by – with bonbons, whee! My first bonbons, *sniffle*. I’m sure she’ll forgive me eventually that I was falling asleep during her visit.

Then Cori wheels herself down the hallway to visit, along with her mom, and even in our painful, med-induced state, we could already recognize the brilliance of Dr. Fine’s work. Cori even flashed me so that I could admire his handiwork – very nice! – and I would have done the same, but this was the point at which things went a bit south. To wit, the migraine. Nausea. And of course, my abject failure at peeing. Yes, peeing. Apparently this is a side effect of the anesthesia, the fact that your body forgets how to pee – so no matter how long the water in the sink ran, how long I attempted to pee, there remained a total disconnect.

“I’m a failure at peeing!” I wail to my wonderful nurse Jean, when she comes back into the room.

She of course tries to reassure me that this is pretty common, but I know the truth: FAIL.

So that was the first time I got the catheter, and when I still wasn’t peeing at 1AM, I got the catheter again, and this time they left it in, apparently worried that I might never pee again under my own volition and would have to wander around like some geriatric 90-year-old the rest of my enfeebled life. Which, I note, would only make me even MORE of a catch, me and my bad self, what with the catheter, the brittle bones which might snap at any moment, The Cancer. What guy wouldn’t look at all that and see it as an exciting challenge?

That night, they have to pester my doctor to get some special migraine meds ordered (sorry Dr. Fine!), and they keep putting anti-nausea meds into my IV, even as I sleep nestled next to a plastic bucket all night, just in case. And my nighttime nurse did like the fact that I put the Fuck Cancer hat on my head, to see if it could help the migraine go away by compressing the blood vessels on my head. Good times….