I'm profoundly tired. I just had dinner: Michele made some cod, and boiled a potato, and I thawed some home-made chicken broth and cooked some frozen spinach. Then it all went into the blender in various combinations, through the strainer, and down the hatch. A buttery potato / cod puree, and then a spinach/ginger/butter/salt soup. C'est bien fait.
I had put in a case of chicken broth in liter Tetrapaks, and find a cup has 1/2 gram of sodium, no calcium, and 10 calories. Really not what I had in mind. What was I thinking?
Today the plastery bandage came off my chin, 5 days to the hour after the surgery. I've stopped the pain killers after last night's misery. I feel much calmer, if heavy with unspecified ache. Only the stitches on the side hurt in particular, when I cough, which I do from time to time from throat tickles. Maybe tonight I'll sleep some, instead of waking every 10-15 min with throat tickles and chokings.
I keep pondering the role of drugs. When I came out of surgery I kept throwing up. This wasn't as horrid as one might think -- the worst is when you're not really throwing up but might sometime soon. But the nurses wanted to control it and they tried 5 different methods on me, including Halcyon, if I heard them right. At another point the next day some dutiful soul approached me (still nauseous) with a syringe of liquid Tylenol. What is it with these dark red sticky sweet preparations? My antibiotic is served up in a similar fashion. I know, someone has Thought All This Through, but something got lost along the way.
And then there's the split pea soup Michele picked up for me - "split pea and ham" with a picture of the little chunk of ham on the label, but the ingredients tell you it's just the water from cooked ham that they let slip into the soup. General Mills. What a world.
Well, that's what's on my mind right now folks. Thanks for listening and have a peaceful night!
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Monday, March 8, 2010
Surgery
I sent this email to a friend, thought I'd post it here for the curious / concerned. This is happening in Boston at Mass-Gen.
I was in for the pre-op last Monday so they went over everything again. They'll knock me out, slice open my chest, take some cartilage from where the ribs meet the sternum, play God and fashion a new woman.. no, I mean fashion 2 new jaw joints (the condyles, to be exact), slice me open just in front of each ear and again under the chin on each side (4 incisions around the face), saw off the deformed condyles and stick on the new ones, tuck a bit of flap from the muscles around the joint into the socket for cushioning, and sew me all back up. They'll stick a "splint" ie a piece of plastic between my teeth to hold them apart a little bit and then fasten the teeth together so I don't move the jaw at all for the first week or so while hopefully the bone graft takes. It's a six hour operation! Takes place on Monday the 15th, first thing in the morning. I'll be in the hospital one or two nights, depending how I do.
After about a week they'll give me a little mobility so I start moving the joint and after about 6 to 8 weeks I'll have an open mouth again. Meanwhile I'll lose 5 or 10 lbs and drink a lot of broth and protein drinks and such. The ribs will grow back. Life will go on. I'll be relieved it's over.
The point of this is to give me back the centimeter or so I've lost from my lower jaw and tip it back so the teeth meet properly and I can go back to eating things like salad and nuts and such. I mean, I can eat those now but it doesn't work so well, and I can only fit little bites of everything.
They'll probably inadvertently slice some nerves in my face and I'll have numbness or muscle weakness, which will slowly abate over a year or so. As a rule it's only peripheral nerves.
The ribs will hurt a lot and I'll have to be careful to take lots of deep breaths so my lungs don't get infected.
Sometimes I get pretty freaked out about all this but I saw the surgeon and his chief resident on Monday and they're awfully nice so I felt better. And I find the hospital kind of fascinating -- such a big, self-contained organism.
I'll probably get back on my bike next summer. Maybe. No one tracks bicycle accidents so it's hard to assess the risk very exactly, but it's not negligible. But it's such a fun way to get around it'll be hard to resist.
So that's the report...
I was in for the pre-op last Monday so they went over everything again. They'll knock me out, slice open my chest, take some cartilage from where the ribs meet the sternum, play God and fashion a new woman.. no, I mean fashion 2 new jaw joints (the condyles, to be exact), slice me open just in front of each ear and again under the chin on each side (4 incisions around the face), saw off the deformed condyles and stick on the new ones, tuck a bit of flap from the muscles around the joint into the socket for cushioning, and sew me all back up. They'll stick a "splint" ie a piece of plastic between my teeth to hold them apart a little bit and then fasten the teeth together so I don't move the jaw at all for the first week or so while hopefully the bone graft takes. It's a six hour operation! Takes place on Monday the 15th, first thing in the morning. I'll be in the hospital one or two nights, depending how I do.
After about a week they'll give me a little mobility so I start moving the joint and after about 6 to 8 weeks I'll have an open mouth again. Meanwhile I'll lose 5 or 10 lbs and drink a lot of broth and protein drinks and such. The ribs will grow back. Life will go on. I'll be relieved it's over.
The point of this is to give me back the centimeter or so I've lost from my lower jaw and tip it back so the teeth meet properly and I can go back to eating things like salad and nuts and such. I mean, I can eat those now but it doesn't work so well, and I can only fit little bites of everything.
They'll probably inadvertently slice some nerves in my face and I'll have numbness or muscle weakness, which will slowly abate over a year or so. As a rule it's only peripheral nerves.
The ribs will hurt a lot and I'll have to be careful to take lots of deep breaths so my lungs don't get infected.
Sometimes I get pretty freaked out about all this but I saw the surgeon and his chief resident on Monday and they're awfully nice so I felt better. And I find the hospital kind of fascinating -- such a big, self-contained organism.
I'll probably get back on my bike next summer. Maybe. No one tracks bicycle accidents so it's hard to assess the risk very exactly, but it's not negligible. But it's such a fun way to get around it'll be hard to resist.
So that's the report...
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