The Home Stretch

After waiting four days to see a doctor about what caused my trip to the ER I finally had an answer. I did have a dermoid cyst that needed to be removed if I was going to get any better and the only way to remove it was surgery. I was scheduled for surgery the following morning and was planning for at least one night in the hospital recovering plus a week of no activity which isn't really my kind of week.

still smiling

They weren't sure if they would be able to do it laparoscopically, 3 or 4 small incisions, because the cyst was fairly large but they wanted to try because the other option, 5 inch incision cutting through my abdominal muscles, would require a much longer recovery. During pre-surgery I was poked four times including twice for blood and twice trying to get an IV. Thankfully they use lidocaine to do IVs so they're not that bad. According to my nurse my veins are some of the most difficult she's ever worked with and made a joke about how I would have a hard time if I tried being an IV drug user (which I don't plan on being EVER)! After all that was over, my friends were allowed back into the room and we watched shark week until I was drugged up and wheeled off to surgery.The next thing I remember was waking up in the recovery room FREEZING with a dull ache in my stomach that seemed to get sharper. Getting up for the first few times felt like I was getting stabbed in the gut by a knife and it was excruciating plus I was annoyed that I had to get help to unplug from from all the monitors before I could get up but it got easier.

Finally, after a long night of compression boots and a blood pressure cuff waking me up every 15 minutes, the doctor retold me how everything went (he told me when I was in the recovery room and I don't recall any of it) and said I would probably be able to go home so long as my pulse and temperature went down (my pulse never went below 130 which kind of freaked the doctors out considering my resting is normally around 60). Around noon my pulse had gone down some and they thought letting me go may relieve some stress and in turn lower it further. So I was discharged in time for lunch and went straight from the hospital to Qdoba (all I had for a day and a half was 3 crackers and some strawberries).

I'm now on the home stretch a week out from surgery and can start running again tomorrow. Sometimes it's hard to see how all of this could be for my own good (other than getting out of preseason running and 3 a days) but I know God has a plan through all of this and He is reveling it to me slowly (which I'll save for another post). For now I'm just grateful that all of this is resolved and hopefully I won't have to deal with it again.

*and just to keep the tally going I had been poked a total of 9 times before leaving the hospital*