The surgery was on Thursday. 

Friday I "slept"  a couple of hours in the hospital. Was dishcharged Saturday night.

Saturday night, I was exhausted and in pain so I slept in my recliner from about 1am to 6am, then again from 7 am to 11 am.

Saturday I didn't feel that well and just kind of sat in misery. I couldn't even concentrate enough to watch TV or distract myself. I ate some soup and drank a shake and started feeling better.

The doc prescribed me 12 Ambien, and I took Saturday night and slept fro 12 hours, which felt very good. If I can keep doing that I'll be healed faster than I can imagine. Just gotta keep protein up, and I'm not eating as much since I don't feel well overall. But Saturday I had 2 protein shakes with 15g protein each, some chicken soup, some toast, some skittles, some rice with cheese. Little servings of everything. I had to take my anti nausea med once, but I think it was because I took my antibiotic without eating.

Sunday, after that long sleep, I felt a lot better. Me peeing was almost back to normal but not quite. I still had some in there after I went. It was time to shower. We decided to do it in our guest shower, farther away from my recliner, because the shower was bigger and we could both get in. I was walking better on sunday and was able to get up by myself. However, when we started peeling off the bandages, I started to get light headed and dizzy. It lasted for so long I thought I might black out. So I walked back to my recliner. Paul had already removed all the back bandages, and I just sat down. My recliner was covered with a sheet so it was ok if any crud got on it. I sat down and drank a shake while he removed the rest of my bandages. My legs were shaking, but they finally calmed down. When everything was better, I got into the shower and just let the water run over me. Paul helped me soap up above and below the incision while I held the drains. It was a quick shower and I felt so much better afterward. It had been 4 days since I had showered, and I'm a two bath a day kind of person.

Paul helped me put on the clean compression garment, the one that had previously had blood spilled all over it but that he had cleaned and dried. We buttoned it up to the pelvis then used non stick gauze pads to put all around the incision line. Paul said I had staples in the back, but I haven't seen them. When the gauze was in place, we pulled the garment all the way up. It's tight enough to hold the pads in place, and I haven't had any problems with them moving or any leaking of oozing.

Even though I'm in pain, it's kind of nice just sitting in my recliner and not being expected to do anything. I just finished my second semester of grad school and I was burned out. The surgery was literally the day after my last final. So not having to think about that til the 2nd week of January or so is a real relief.

On Sunday I wasn't in too much pain at all. There is this one section of the incision near my left hip bone, that hurts more than any other part though, and the pain comes and goes. If it wasn't for that part, I wouldn't have any other pain except for slight ab pain...like having just overly worked out to the point of not being able to move. But that little part of the incision which feels like it hurts along about 2 inches of it, when it hurts, IT BURNS. The nurses thought it was probably nerve endings, because some people have them in a certain place and the pain meds don't help them as much as everything else. Well I don't really feel like I have pain anywhere else, which considering I was sliced all the way around, is pretty good.

Sunday night I had a little more energy. I got up on my own and walked around the house. I got my own cup and poured my own drink. I picked up some mess with my finger-toes and passed them to my hand so I could throw them away. I was feeling ok, but could probably only walk around like that for 10 mins at a time before mr. left-hip incision starts to gripe.

Now it is Sunday. I took another ambien last night, but didn't sleep for 12 hours, but still got a solid sleep. When I woke up though, I felt a little sick. Probably needed to eat something, plus I'm always stiffer after not getting up for several hours. Paul is still emptying my drains regularly and I'm trying to make an appointment on Wednesday to see the doctor. He'd wanted to see me after a week, but Paul is going back to work on Thursday, so I need to do it before then. Hopefully we can get that worked out.

 

 

I was scheduled to have my lower body lift on December 13 at 8:00 am with Dr. Morrissey and Presbyterian Plano Hospital. My husband Paul dropped me off at the hopsital and stayed with me til about 7:30 when he had to go to work. We decided it was more important for him to have an extra day off work at the end to take care of me rather than wasting it when the hospital would be caring for me.

They put me under and before I knew it, I was awake and the procedure was over. I felt nauseated and said that I was going to throw up. Then I fell asleep. I found out later that they had given me a high dosage of anti nausea medicine that was extremely sleep inducing. Well it worked and I didn't have any more nausea after that time.

I wasn't in too much discomfort as long as I wasn't moving, but I wasn't able to adjust myself in the bed at all due to very sore ab muscles. I was wearing a compression garment that started below my breasts and went down to just above my knees. The doctor told me to wear the compression garment until Sunday, then I could remove it, shower, clean the incisions, and put on a 2nd clean garment.

I was catheterized so that I would not have to get up at all on the first day. I had 4 drains coming out of me., tubes that ended with see through little balls that needed to be drained every few hours. Blood an fluid accumulated in them. 

I slept about 2 - 4 hours that night and woke up a lot. I had extremely dry mouth and nurses kept checking on me. Around 8 am, they removed my catheter. Not a fun experience. Then they said I needed to pee before I could be discharged.

A technician came in to remove the fluid from my drains and proceeded to spill a cup of blood/fluid all over me and my compression garment. Because of that I had to get up and have them change into the new garment which was an ordeal. And I was still unable to pee.  By 6 pm, I still had not peed so they had to put a catheter in me again, drain, and remove it. It was a horrible experience. After that I felt like I had to pee but still could not. They gave me until 10 pm or I would have to stay another night. I finally went around 9:30 pm after trying everything and sitting there for hours.

Walking around was hard, but they had me walk once around the hospital. I have to walk completely stooped over, and it feels like a board was inserted underneath my skin. They discharged me at 10 and Paul took me home. I had to go up 3 flights of stairs, but I just did it slowly and it was fine. By the time I got to my recliner, I was exhausted from the 2 days in the hospital with bodily trauma and only 2 - 4 hours of sleep. I felt really bad, and I still had major urges to pee but could not completely empty my bladder. I was able to get some sleep from about 1am to 6am, then again from 7 am to 11:00 am. Then I had a protein shake and ate some food. I felt much better after that and the pain was even better. Until then, I had just sat in the recliner miserably, dozing off here and there, but after eating, I was able to watch tv, and get on the computer to distract myself.

Paul has been a good nurse. He has to empty my drains every now and then and record the time and how much fluid came out of them. He's gotten good at helping me get on my feet and getting  back into the recliner afterward. I basically have a sheet draped over the recliner, a small pillow behind my back, a larger one under my head and a large one under my knees to keep them bent when the chair is reclined. My thigh muscles are sore from having to walk in a perpetual squat. When I'm still I mostly don't have any pain except for a small part of the incision. It feels like 1 or 2 inches of the incision really hurts. I'm wondering if it's a drain tube pressing against the area because the compression garment was squeezing the drain tubes up my sides so tightly that they pressed into my skin and really burned. We ended up putting a panty liner between the tubes and my skin and that really helped!

I'm supposed to shower on Sunday and then put on the new garment and wear that for another day. I'm worried about showering and cleaning the incision line. He gave us instructions on how to do it, but I think it might be painful. We'll see how it goes.

 

 

I wasn't feeling good about doing just an abdominoplasty, when I clearly have sagging skin all over. So I went to a different doctor, the one recommended to me by my Weight Loss Surgeon. I was really pleased with everything about Dr. Morrissey, his staff, his personality, his prices, his qualifications. So I'm booked for December 13. 

I can hardly wait.

As I mentioned in my last post, I hurt my knee back in July 2011. I finally had the much needed surgery on it on Sept 14. It is already so much better, and I've started phsyical therapy on it.  I've just been cleared to do the elliptical again after a month of not being allowed to do anything like that.

I had my general wellness check up with the doctor. It had been 2 years instead of one due to my husband's layoff and our lack of insurance. In 2010, my cholesterol had been high. She wanted to watch it and see if it went down as I continued losing weight. Well this year, every single thing was completely healthy. So basically I was the healthiest I've ever been.

I have been pretty discouraged because over the past year, with the knee injury, the weight stabilization, the loss of insurance leading to me running out of PCOS meds (which affect my metabolism)...   I felt like everything was against me. Now I see that I wasn't giving myself enough credit. Even though I am stuck with 20 lbs that I still want to lose (possibly 30), my body was still becoming healthier inside. That's a pretty strong motivator.

I put down a deposit with Dr. Christina Stiles for an extended abdominoplasty scheduled for December 14, 2012. I'm very excited about getting rid of the excess belly skin.  I'll try to post updates about that process.

I haven't posted on the blog for a long time.

A lot has happened. I decided I wanted to be a speech language pathologist and had to go back to school for a year to get the pre-req classes since my Bachelor's is in English. So I did that for a year, then I got accepted into the Master's program at TWU.

I haven't posted about my weight, because I feel like I was pretty normal for about a year.

A year ago this past july, I hurt my knee somehow. It was a torn meniscus that required a small surgery to fix. However, my husband got laid off the very day I was scheduling the doctor's appointment. I didn't get to have the surgery. So I had to stop the running that I had just begun getting good at.

I slowly gained, or "stabilized" to put it a nicer way, about 10lbs and I have been in the 180s for many months now. I admit I have only been trying to lose the weight on and off.

I've had a couple of plastic surgery consultations now, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to go with Dr. Christine Stiles.

I'll have to update more about that another time when I have more details.