Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Life in the Pain Lane

Doctors are not 100% truthful.  Well it's not as if they actually lie, they just negate to tell you or warn you about how exactly painful their op is going to be.  This of course leaves you unprepared psychologically.  You think it's going to be a quick and easy procedure.  But 5 weeks later and you still have plenty pain and limited movement.  Pain sucks.
As you can see, pain does not bring out the best in you.  It saps your energy, causes discomfort and kills all creative thoughts you might possess.  In short, pain kills your ability to think and write.  So no I have not been on holiday rejoicing on the extra time available to work on my book Hush Baby.  For the most part I have been laid up in bed knocked out on painkillers.
Why I thought an arthroscopy in the shoulder would be only slightly painful, I don't know.  It's like when the doctor explains the procedure to you, he makes a tiny hole and inserts a camera, that doesn't sound very painful does it?  Unfortunately that silly camera picked up 5 different problems that needed to be rectified immediately.  This meant 5 holes in the shoulder, 5 times the pain and the procedures included shaving off pieces of bone, fixing a frozen shoulder and repairing a torn tendon.
As if this wasn't enough, 2 weeks later I was back in hospital for a breast reconstruction.  This was a very new technique that sounded painless when the plastic surgeon described it to me.  Haha is all I can say.  After that op I felt like I'd been trampled on by 30 men at the bottom of a rugby scrum.  They took 500g of fat from my sides, shook and stirred it like a martini, converted it to 250ml of stem cell rich lipo-filling and injected it into my breast where they had to remove the implant after I went into septic shock last year.  And the plastic surgeon says we'll have round two of that procedure in June.  Charming.
I did get to have breakfast with Jodi Picoult though, and listen to her interesting and entertaining talk on wolves.  Definitely a highlight of my otherwise miserable Christmas holiday.  The lesson to be learned is do not embark on two big surgeries in a two week period.
The weather has been beautiful most of the time, I just haven't been in a condition to enjoy it.
Hopefully my shoulder will be sorted and will be back to normal in a couple of months.  The shoulder surgeon said it can take a year to come right.  As I said before, charming.
So do I have any new year's resolutions?  Survive, dig deep and survive.  That's all I want for 2013.
Have a good one!

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