Buckle in, kids, we’re going to talk about surgery drains.
“My double mastectomy went really well last week” says almost no one ever, I’m assuming. But, we have been very lucky. The pain has not been bad and I’ve been able to avoid the narcotic painkillers that I didn’t want any part of. Mostly the pain comes as my nerve endings start to wake up and realize that a large part of me is gone (well, not that large…a respectfully sized part of me is gone). The other source of irritation is the drains.
So, the way this works – as best my layperson brain can understand it – is that fluid is the enemy. My docs don’t want it building up anywhere, so when they were done slicing and dicing, they put in drains. These are plastic globes attached to small tubes – you squeeze the globe and cap it, and it creates suction that pulls the bad stuff out of your body through the tubes into the globes. Makes sense in theory.
In practice, it appears that I have four collapsed plastic softballs each attached to my ribcage by Red Vines measuring two feet. Twice a day, the person I love the most has to push the fluid down the Red Vines, and then open the softballs and dump 30 – 50 ml of reddish fluid into measuring cups. Love is the willingness to measure fluid output, friends.
Further, to keep them from swinging around like wrecking balls, I have to pin each drain to my pajama shirt to walk around the apartment. If I pin them inside the shirt, it is agitating, so I pin them outside.
And, while moving around with this running belt of the apocalypse, I am supposed to keep my elbows in at my side at all times. Thanks to basic cable, I keep thinking of the Alex Hitchens admonishment, “This is where you live. This is your home. You don’t need no pizza; they got food there.”
So, Will Smith is living in my head, I’m a little dizzy from all the prescriptions and I have my own external plumbing system. How have you been?
In between these things, however, it is a huge relief to have surgery behind me, and I am grateful to have so many generous people helping us manage everything. I am grateful to be writing this. I find myself thinking a lot about the future – races I want to run, family and friends I’d like to visit, thank yous I need to send, big things I want to get done in our home and at my job.
It all has to wait, though. Writing this blog post will likely require a four hour nap to follow. I need to embrace the sitting still, whether or not that’s my strong suit. There’s still more battle to fight, and the reconstruction is just beginning. So, I’m making a list to tackle when we’re through: my new boobs resolutions.
#tovictory
