Bye Bye Evil Arvin!

So yesterday was the big day, I had my surgery! I’ve been quite comfortable in my bed for the past 24 hours having my husband waiting on me.

Somehow I managed to not get sick before this surgery. I don’t know how, by the grace of God. If you said a prayer for me, I can’t thank you enough. EVERYONE is sick and I was so scared to attend the one public event I had to be at over the weekend. I decided to be totally ridiculous and wear a dust mask to try to keep the germs away and/or give the illusion that I was sick so that people would not want to come near me. So this is what I looked like all night.

It was a sports themed banquet by the way and I was the emcee, which is why I’m wearing a referee shirt, clever, eh? And don’t mind the dorks behind me.

Anyway, moving on, I did not sleep well on Monday night and woke up feeling very anxious on Tuesday. Luckily, I kept busy at work and the day moved pretty quickly. When I got home I tried to clean the house and make sure everything was in order so that I could just relax and not worry about anything during my recovery time. I didn’t have a hard time getting to sleep Tuesday night but I kept waking up and once I finally fell into a deep sleep my alarm went off at 5:30am. I got up, got ready and we were out the door around 6am. Got to the surgery center a little before 7am. That place was wonderful. We have nothing but great things to say about our experience there. The building is beautiful and super clean and the entire staff was wonderful. Got myself checked in and sat around for a few minutes before they took us back to the pre-op area. Took my blood pressure and temperature, asked some questions and then I changed into my gown and robe, got to keep my big, fuzzy socks on so I was excited about that. It’s the little things. It was time to head back to the operating room, so I kissed my hubby goodbye and as he headed back to the waiting room I headed to the operating room. Laid down on the table, waited a minute, answered a couple more questions and the last thing I remember before passing out was them putting the mask over my nose and mouth and feeling this weird pain in my left arm. Still not sure what that was about, it really hurt and then I was out.

When I woke up they were getting ready to wheel me out of the room and they took me to the recovery area. My mouth was so dry and felt so nasty. They put me in the recovery area and it felt like forever before someone came back to see me (it was probably like 5 minutes max, probably less). Finally someone came over and asked me if I wanted a drink or ice and I said yes, please! She brought me ice, which had never felt so good in my mouth and then I said, “Can I have my Matt?” I think the only thing I wanted more than a drink was my husband. J A minute later there he was with me. Cathy, my wonderful post-op lady, asked me if I wanted a drink and snack. I ended up with some Pepsi and cookies. Matt kept trying to force feed me cookies, but my mouth was so dry, all I wanted was liquid. I hadn’t even thought about the fact that they would put a tube down my throat so I was so confused as to why my mouth was so messed up haha.

My doctor came over a few minutes later and went over everything with us and showed us pictures! I’m like obsessed with these pictures haha. They’re so gross, but so fascinating to me. I need to scan them and then I’ll post some. Anyway, Dr. M seemed quite pleased with everything. He said this surgery definitely needed to be done and everything went very smoothly. Arvin (my cyst, who we named after Arvin Sloane from the TV show Alias that we’re currently watching) was definitely causing problems. I was still very out of it at this point so I can’t remember details very clearly, I’m not sure if Arvin ended up being larger than we realized or if it was just the position of it that was more troublesome than we realized, but it definitely needed to be removed. They also removed a much smaller additional cyst. No endometriosis or anything else though. The only other thing is that my uterine lining is a little inflamed. We’ll have to wait about a week to get results back on that, but hopefully that’s something that can simply be fixed with an antibiotic. And with that we were done, Dr. M took off, we finished up, I got dressed and they wheeled me down to the car.

I got home and went right up to bed, slept for a couple hours and then although I wanted to sleep some more I couldn’t because I had to go to the bathroom very three minutes but couldn’t really go. Man, now I know what it must be like to be pregnant and have to pee tiny amounts all the time. I wasn’t expecting that at all, super annoying but that seems to have subsided now. My throat was very sore yesterday from the tube being down it, but that’s feeling better today too. My incision sites are still very sore. Very sore. My husband went to put his arm around my stomach just a few minutes ago and I screamed and he was all like “what???” What do you mean what?? Haha. Other than that I’m feeling pretty good. Still moving slowly and obviously sore in my abdomen, but overall feeling pretty good. Glad to be staying put in my bedroom for a few days away from the deep freeze that’s happening outside!

I’m excited that this is over and we’re in the recovery phase and hopefully things can move forward again next month! I need to call and make my post-op appointment today, I think I’ll do that now and then resume my TV marathon… or maybe take a nap.