Use your words, Asher!

New Year’s Eve: unwinding the Ace bandage was terrifying, and felt like my chest was going to fall apart. It didn’t, but I did not shower—instead I had a moderate vasovagal response, strapped it all back up, and made a New Year’s banner. Once I felt less like dying, I LEFT THE HOTEL, which was also kind of scary.

I’m being more intentional about my body and health than I’ve maybe ever been in my life. It feels like MY body—like me—in a way that has caught me significantly off-guard, and since I first remember being conscious, again. So I went outside, so I could take my pre-planned number of steps for the day, and cross those off my chart.

But the animal parts of me are VERY SURE I should be lying quite still, in a cave where no predators can spot me, and the speed at which I get exhausted concurs, so the walk was just to the stop-sign, half a block from our hotel, and back.

This was pretty much my day, today. I can tell a lot about the resources demanded by my body and recovery, from how much input my brain needs to feel very satisfied. I can’t generally color for long stretches; I get bored, but today? Well... as you can see. I feel like I’d be perfectly happy to just sit here in my bathrobe, sipping apple juice and drinkable soup, for the rest of my life. Oh, but, content note that I’m about to have a FEW things to say about opioid pain meds, addiction, and medical hysteria, because:

We did have to call the doctor about pain meds, today—they’re working fine; they don’t do weird digestive or cognitive things to me; all is well. But I learned from Aaron that I had a prescription for FIVE days’ worth? And like... I know every medical provider, ever, is a little panicky about opioids, but, A, y’all just cut off whole-ass body parts of mine. B, I am a therapist; I have lots of close contact with both; and if I had to choose—which the actual data STRONGLY confirms I don’t—I’d choose opioid dependency, well before I’d choose a pain disorder. C, I have real good ADHD, and a long-standing bipolar diagnosis; if I had a chemical dependency... I PROMISE it would not be on a CNS depressant.

But these are not things we say aloud, when we want the doctor’s office to write a script that will actually last *through* the weekend, instead of running out the Friday night before our first follow-up appointment, Tuesday (...SERIOUSLY, though; did anyone even bother to count on their fingers?).

...So I let Aaron call, and once the Very Concerned nurse had ascertained that we were just trying to call, you know, BEFORE THE WEEKEND; and that I hadn’t taken 5 days’ worth of meds in 2 and a half; AND had made a comment about “needing to taper me off of” the prescribed medication I’ve been taking for a grand total of 60 hours... oh, and then tried to say they just hAD nO wAy to write the script, since she saw our address was out of town... she finally talked to my actual surgeon (*not*, fascinatingly, the author of the original script); and about 30 seconds later, we got to have enough meds to last through the weekend.

Fortunate, since my discharge instructions repeatedly emphasize the importance of TAKING PAIN MEDS ON TIME and NOT WAITING UNTIL YOU’RE IN PAIN and CONTINUING TO TAKE PRESCRIPTION PAIN MEDICATION CONSISTENTLY UNTIL YOUR FOLLOW-UP APPOINTMENT. You know, the one four days after I wouldn’t have had any left.

The thing that struck me most was the astonishing speed of it.

That’s a strange thing to say about a process that took between 11 months and 25 years to complete, depending on how one counts, but you spend that long chipping away at a thing like that, and you expect something to happen, to slow it down. I’ve spent longer waiting to have a tooth filled. I spent longer, in fact, circling in the hospital parking garage, where a solid 2/3 of the spaces were—surprise!—closed for construction, than I spent actually waiting my turn to take my clothes off and pee all over my hands in a cup. I checked in at the front desk; and then at the surgical desk, where even a quick gender update took all of thirty seconds; and then upstairs, in the surgical waiting area—and then had about five minutes to make a post about the color-coding on the patient-name monitors, on the wall, before my name clicked over to blue.

Nothing about hormones happened this quickly. Hell, even a name change or passport update comes with half a dozen waiting periods, after you’ve done as much thing as you can do.

The thing I was the most anxious about, in the end, was my own anxiety; but I had hardly any time for it to percolate. We’d packed based on the timeline of my partner’s recent, minor surgery, so I brought a journal and crochet project and iPad and a couple of battery packs for my phone... but once the surgeon sketched out the shape of my new chest in purple Sharpie, and the nurse-anesthetist ordered me some gabapentin and pre-emptive pain meds (she was the only person I asked a question, and it was, “Will I wake up in pain?”), I had maybe five minutes before they wheeled me away.

The “something to relax me” in the IV hit me before we reached the hallway, and I got about 3 seconds of awareness in the OR—long enough for my nurse-anesthetist friend to tuck a cap over my hair—before I was waking up to graham crackers and Sprite, and a recovery nurse who was visibly impressed and maybe a little concerned by my capacity for !!EATING!! right after surgery.

After I put away my second tumbler of Sprite without visible difficulty, she asked if I’d like to go home. I responded with a (probably moderately incoherent) narrative about the variety of snacks in our hotel room; was wheeled down to the car; and drank so many soups before falling asleep until my next dose of pain meds.

I was waiting for significant pain and overwhelming exhaustion, but it never showed up. Soreness like I’d done too many push-ups the day before; the best sleep I’ve had in years; and an appetite like high school cross-country always gave me—and an overwhelming sense of well-being, accomplishment, and smugfuckery, for however long I was awake.

I walked 1000 steps, napped a lot, and texted a few friends about how weirdly easy it all felt. It all felt weirdly easy.

Plus, my surgeon covered the sutures and bandages with the same kind of waterproof dressings my most recent tattoo artist used. This both meant that I had absolutely no wound-care requirements till my next-Tuesday follow-up appointment, and that I felt like I’d already been through this once before.

And it turns out that’s more of an experience than I anticipated.

I keep wanting to post more detail (and, frankly, more blood and guts) than is really Facebook appropriate—plus, the filters FB needs to keep most of my family out of the way are kind of a pain in the ass.

So who knows if anyone will see it on this account, after such a long stretch of radio silence. But I’m going to copy-paste some catching-up posts, from my notes to myself and photos OF myself from the last several days.

“...mmhmm.”