The first few car rides out of the hospital were agonizing. Every bump in the road seemed amplified by some neural perversity in my chest, and the insults to my spine and rib cage were raised from whispers to shouts...sharp stabbing shouts of inarticulate spite. The first ride out of the hospital was an hour and a half stretch up Highway 52 from Rochester, where St. Mary's held pride of place as the Mayo Brothers official hospital, to Bloomington, where our cats sulked and plotted revenge.
The cats got over our 8 day absence. It is almost three weeks since surgery, two weeks since discharge. We negotiate the Edina potholes and manhole cover sinks carefully, and I still wince but don't cry out. I have upped my time on the treadmill to an hour a day at 1.5 miles an hour, and the scar on my chest is healing with an unexpected smoothness and grace.
As we left the grocery store today, I was able to carry the two 10" bromeliads, one in each hand. None of the prosperous suburban Minnesotans we saw milling the aisles or scuttling across the parking lot could have guessed what a signal victory that was for me. I have learned from pain, the most resolute and impersonal teacher, to hold my ears over my shoulders and keep my chin in and down. The alternative slouch and cantilever of my massive head, neck nearly horizontal, quickly results in spasms in my lower trapezius muscle, the source, my massage therapist tells me, of mortgage-paying income for all massage therapists these days.
The first time I willed the courage to look at my naked torso after surgery, I saw a startling sight in the mirror. It wasn't the scar from my collar bone down and slightly right of the center of my sternum that alarmed me. It was the atrophy of my upper frame, the bony, listing shoulders and flattened shaved pink leather of my chest sunk to the depth of a pizza box. I couldn't hold my head up, or lower my right shoulder. I had no deltoid muscles left in my shoulders and my arms were thin as chicken shanks. The confidence of the surgical team pushed me through a week-long ordeal of diuresis that resulted in losing over 35 lbs of fluid weight -- almost 6 lbs a day. You would expect shock to the kidneys or some kind of revolt of the whole system subject to such a relentless drain.
But it was fluid retention that had me in the hospital in the first place. Fluids, waters and plasmas and leaked vital elixirs of bowel, had ballooned my gut and ankles over months. I couldn't bend to put on socks, or take a whole breath, or sleep for more than 30 minutes at a time. I couldn't eat, as I felt like a forced goose prepped for a gourmand's pate all the time, and I didn't have the energy to get off the sofa most of the day the last few weeks before surgery. Couldn't eat, sleep, move. Couldn't love or be loved, or care about anything except the desperate need for a diagnosis and a cure for whatever was turning me into a creature out of a Hieronymous Bosch depiction of living hell.
The cats got over our 8 day absence. It is almost three weeks since surgery, two weeks since discharge. We negotiate the Edina potholes and manhole cover sinks carefully, and I still wince but don't cry out. I have upped my time on the treadmill to an hour a day at 1.5 miles an hour, and the scar on my chest is healing with an unexpected smoothness and grace.
As we left the grocery store today, I was able to carry the two 10" bromeliads, one in each hand. None of the prosperous suburban Minnesotans we saw milling the aisles or scuttling across the parking lot could have guessed what a signal victory that was for me. I have learned from pain, the most resolute and impersonal teacher, to hold my ears over my shoulders and keep my chin in and down. The alternative slouch and cantilever of my massive head, neck nearly horizontal, quickly results in spasms in my lower trapezius muscle, the source, my massage therapist tells me, of mortgage-paying income for all massage therapists these days.
The first time I willed the courage to look at my naked torso after surgery, I saw a startling sight in the mirror. It wasn't the scar from my collar bone down and slightly right of the center of my sternum that alarmed me. It was the atrophy of my upper frame, the bony, listing shoulders and flattened shaved pink leather of my chest sunk to the depth of a pizza box. I couldn't hold my head up, or lower my right shoulder. I had no deltoid muscles left in my shoulders and my arms were thin as chicken shanks. The confidence of the surgical team pushed me through a week-long ordeal of diuresis that resulted in losing over 35 lbs of fluid weight -- almost 6 lbs a day. You would expect shock to the kidneys or some kind of revolt of the whole system subject to such a relentless drain.
But it was fluid retention that had me in the hospital in the first place. Fluids, waters and plasmas and leaked vital elixirs of bowel, had ballooned my gut and ankles over months. I couldn't bend to put on socks, or take a whole breath, or sleep for more than 30 minutes at a time. I couldn't eat, as I felt like a forced goose prepped for a gourmand's pate all the time, and I didn't have the energy to get off the sofa most of the day the last few weeks before surgery. Couldn't eat, sleep, move. Couldn't love or be loved, or care about anything except the desperate need for a diagnosis and a cure for whatever was turning me into a creature out of a Hieronymous Bosch depiction of living hell.
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