Post Op Day Four and Staving Off The Usurper....

                               Surgery was April 5th, today is Post-Op Day 4.

                              Pain pierces so sharp, unforgiving and relentless.

                            I imagine this is what it's like to be shot with an arrow.

Craziest thing: in hospital, they gave me powerful IV pain med to stop pain---Dilaudid. After I puked oceans all over myself, bed, floor, johnny and people in the next state, I re-named it DilauDON'T.

They offered me morphine. Ummmmmm---nope, not really feeling the heavy duty painkillers which cause as many problems as they (temporarily) solve. No IV narcotics, I said. So ---they started me on two Percocet every four hours, which I was getting around the clock. I wasn't sleeping much so I didn't mind the early a.m. doses.  While a lightweight in the pain management world, Percocet was my Floyd Mayweather, was helping me cope with the pain as long as I took it every four hours. I got a lecture from one of my Angel Nurses when I decided to try spacing out the pain med over more hours. "Don't let the pain get ahead of you, then it's harder to control", she urged in sweet, loving tones.

Okay, I figured. Every four hours it is, then. I give up, I give in and I'll take the shit if it helps. And it did help. I didn't realize how much it was helping until I came home. My son filled my discharge script which said ONE PILL EVERY SIX HOURS AS NEEDED FOR PAIN.

                                                  One pill?? Every six hours??!?

The Opioid Crisis paranoia has now hit home, 100 mph.  One of my Angel Nurses spoke with me at length about how they've had to change their entire approach to pain management, but their Oncology patients (which I am one of) are being hardest hit by this new minimalist mode of pain management.

So I'm laying here asking myself HOW the hell any M.D. could conscience sending a cancer patient home with only three days' worth of pain medicine?? I have a dear friend with lung cancer who was sent home after a lobe being removed from her lung with only three day's worth of pain med. Good God, does the medical community hear itself---realize it's swung way back in the other direction, to Draconian-esque measures?

Unfortunately, I have other worries now. That every-4-hours-pain-med was such a bountiful blessing but it effectively shut down my bowel. It also made me believe I was doing way better than I actually was because it dampened the pain way down, like music coming from a far-away room: you know it's music playing but can't quite recognize the tune.

I've taken Milk of Magnesia & Colace til they're coming out my damned ears.  No progress. Abdomen bloated, distended, no appetite, no metabolic end-product. ( Give me a break here; tryna be a lil bit delicate, at least somewhat.)

I've tried strong coffee (usually works like a champ), choked down oatmeal I didn't want to eat and had my granddaughter take me for 1/8 mile walk. Zero outcome. Like, REALLY zero.

  The only measure left I could do is not take the pain med. Like, not at all. At this writing, which is taking me forever to do and hurts like I imagine being repeatedly stabbed in the chest hurts, I haven't had any pain med since 9:00 a.m. yesterday.  ( It's two forty-eight p.m. right now)

                                  I also haven't slept more than 2 hours at a time.

                        I feel such intense anger and I have no clue where to point it.

"This is the worst part of the storm, Mom", my youngest son said in his sweet, empathic voice. In a few days, I'll be better; will have sailed past this reef of razor-sharp suffering. But for now---every minute of every hour is agony-rich.

I don't want to talk to anyone. I'm not up to friends wishing me well or checking on me. I hurt, I hurt so bad. That's what I care about now, that's what subsumes the major portion of every breath I take.

I've also realized being in severe pain is an extremely intimate situation; deeply personal and very difficult to share. You have to know someone very well to be in severe pain in front of them, to talk to them, allowing them to witness that oddly discordant note in your voice; you must trust that seeing you cleaved, broken by pain won't affect their idea of who you are.

You are allowing someone to open and read you like a magazine when you communicate during severe pain. That requires immense trust.  Trust that you won't be judged; trust that the person you're talking to doesn't break down under the weight of your physical misery.

         
                                              Thanks, Cancer, you asshole.



I can see my beautiful arcing stately trees through my living room window, where I am installed, propped up on the couch.  It helps, seeing those trees, knowing there is still a world outside this living room and this pain.

I had a bad back before any of this started; my back is screaming and so are my hips. My incisions traverse my chest from armpit to armpit and travel up my chest over my sternum a short ways.

             I swear I can feel every single one of them, pulling me drum-head taut and snug.
                                                              Too snug.

It feels like I've got something way too tight on, something I am utterly desperate to take off. When re-arranging gauze pads to gird my pitiful injured chest from the surgical bra I must wear 24/7, I saw part of my incisions.

Straight-up Frankenstein. I look like a monster of many parts that's been meticulously, thoughtfully pieced back together. Teeny black precisely neat hem of sutures holding me together. I'm grateful they're there and horrified by them all at once.  It's confusing.

  I couldn't breathe, began feeling the hot flood of a panic attack washing over me. My face flamed, my knees turned to water and I couldn't shake the horror of suffocating, heart jackhammering like it was going to jump out of my chest and sprint away from the scene of the crime.

I am wounded. I am wounded and I want to tear my hair and rant in three languages but that would only bring new waves of soul-wrenching torture.

From this experience, I learned it's not the time to look at incisions, to avoid that at ALL costs.

                          I am acutely aware that my body is changed. Forever.

My body is no longer the body I was born with, that carried me faithfully and with inexhaustible strength and hopefully, grace, through 67 years of life.

     I am changed. At this point, I honestly don't know if it's for the better.  I hurt, I hurt so bad.

I keep asking God, Jesus, Mother Mary, whichever of the Holy Trinity is on call, to please spare me some of this hideous suffering. I think of the millions of American women who endure this pain, which eats you up, gnaws your bones and spits you out.  I feel a sisterhood with them... but knowing they have suffered this woe too does nothing to alleviate my own suffering. I try to convince myself I'm being a baby, that I'm whining.  Then I think--- BUT I JUST HAD MAJOR SURGERY.    
                                                     CANCER SURGERY.

I wish I was of sound enough mind right now to explore the reasons why women are burdened with what surely must be acknowledged as a cultural sense of empirical guilt for professing to pain, like, we think we need to apologize for having it; but I hurt too fucking bad to work that out right now.  I know it's a thing, though.

   I've even tried thinking of this pain as cleansing---that it will hollow me out, clear away my spiritual debris, rendering me mercifully clean and light; something new and beautiful, like dead steer skulls left out in the sun, metamorphosizing into astonishing iconic wonders of the desert. Something Georgia O'Keefe would paint.

                   I am becoming something in the desert that Georgia O'Keefe would paint.

       Or maybe it's Edvard Munch.  Yes, Munch would surely paint me now; my mouth opened wide in a terror-filled, soundless scream because making any noise would hurt so much more than it already does.

Some may think because I made a blog post that all is well, that it can't be THAT bad if I can sit and write.

 It was an act of supreme defiance, this post, of telling cancer that it doesn't get it all; that it doesn't get all of me.

                                                 I did this in a righteous rage.

I've stood up to cancer for four whole hours, not unlike the courageous, slender steel blade of a woman in Louisiana who stood quietly defiant, determinedly dignified and singularly alone in the face of threatening, imposing cops in riot gear ready to strike, poised to devour her in her entirety. Don't get it twisted---Her battle and mine are wholly different, not my intent to equivocate that ---but it took every fiber of that brand of strength she had for me to make this post. Trust that it takes a supreme level of courage to defy this much threat for any period of time. In that particular aspect, she and I are sisters: We've staved off the bully usurper for a few moments.

                   

It's taken four and a half hours to write this with lie-downs interspersed as needed. I am angry at how much pain was involved in the simple act of writing, a ritual I've done daily, committed to since I was thirteen years old; now relying heavily on auto-correct or there'd be no post at all.

                                                  Anger---there it is again.


                    WHY do I have this nagging sense I've done all agony this to myself?

                    My middle son says I have enough guilt to start my own religion.

                                                   Maybe he's right.

Something about all this pain feels shockingly punitive, a heady sour incense smoking up the air in my consciousness; thinking I probly need to examine that much more closely.