Recovery

It's Monday night, 3 days since the surgery. Technically, here's what I had done:
(warning: this will be detailed. if you don't really want to know, just know that they got what they went in for and nothing more, and everything is okay. now stop reading if you don't want the gory details.)

• Laporotomy to remove 3 uterine fibroids

• Chromopertubation

In plain English, that means that they made an incision in my abdomen (the laporotomy). The other thing is when dye is injected into the uterus and fallopian tubes to see if they're blocked. The doctor said, as long as they were in there, they'd check out everything.

Good news: The inside of my uterus looks good - no endometriosis, they found 3 fibroids, and were able to get them out with minimal blood loss (100 cc, which is very low. Fortunately, I didn't have to fight the odds of getting some life-threatening disease from a blood transfusion! Yay!). Here come some details: The doctor said that the size of the largest fibroid allowed them to make the abdominal incision, pull the uterus out of the abdomen, and rest it outside. The fibroid was so big that it didn't slip back into my stomach. Gross. But good, because they minimized the possibility of infection because they didn't have to actually do work in the cavity. They didn't have to pack it, or risk cutting something else. Now, this is really way too much info and I wanted to know but then, I didn't. I'm glad I know though.

More good news: one tube is clear and both look good from the outside.

Stitches:
I have dissolving stitches on the inside and dermabond (basically, krazy glue) holding me together on the outside. This should still allow me to wear those skimpy bikinis I love so much.

Medication:

After the surgery, I had a morphine drip with a button to get more every 6 minutes. I tried to tough it out for about 6 minutes, then hit the button. It was nice. I also had something called teradol, something like really strong motrin, I think. This was also done IV. The IV was in until Saturday morning, along with the oh so pleasant foley catheter. Warning to those who have never had one. These catheters can become"positional" (the word the nurses used), which means the tube is not in the best position to drain so even though you've got one, you still have to pee. This happened a few times, and I'm smart so I figured it out. When I felt like I had to pee, I buzzed for a nurse or a PCA and asked them to adjust it. At one point, one of the PCAs and I were talking about the catheter, and I was saying I was glad they had taken it out. She said something like "Yeah, they can get positional" and I said, I know and then they don't drain and you can feel pressure" and she said "OH, are you a nurse, or a PCA?" with a sort of tone that said that I couldn't possibly know about this phenomenon. I said "No, I just know because it happened to me 3 times already." Ok, moving on. I'm getting annoyed again.

I came home on Sunday, at 1. I'm all set up in my old bedroom @ my parents' house. Cable, DVD player, phone, bed, the works. I'll update more later.