One Month Update

It's been exactly one month since my surgery, so I thought I'd check in.

Pain. Yes, there is still pain. Pain when I walk, pain when I sleep, pain when I move. If I sit very still, I don't feel it, and can actually forget about it. Until I stand up. I'm using Aleve right now, every 6 hours. No Vicodin. The pain is certainly less than even a week ago. But according to doctors, I probably have another month to go before I feel almost normal again.

My son's grandmother wrote me to tell me that it will take me a year to get over this. "I can say confidently that it will take you longer than you think it will." She lost her uterus some years ago, and "I never missed it." Well, I know the last part is true.

As to what the area feels like, it's still a swollen mass right behind the suture line, right where the uterus used to be, and a little behind every inch of the vertical line itself. The "line" of the incision is much smoother than it has been, and doesn't hurt. It's the area where the uterus was that hurts, close to my navel, where the incision was started.

Fatigue. I still get tired quickly. I can go out for a few hours now, but when I come back I'm pretty tired. But every day brings new stamina.

Exercise. I walk quite a bit, I think, most days, but not on a flat line. I don't go for walks, normally. I need to build that into my schedule, a little bit more each day.

Diet. It's Passover now, so I'm not eating bread, which is a good thing. More salads, fresh fruit. I slipped back to some of my old habits because, hey, when you're hungry, you reach for whatever's convenient. Chips, ice cream. I try not to keep such things in the house normally, but I have slipped in the past two weeks. I am still holding at 10 pounds lost since the surgery, and I hope to improve upon that in the next few weeks.

All in all, things are going well. I have had a few set-backs in recovery (notably, nausea, bleeding from the clamps being removed, recovery from getting off Vicodin), but each of those only lasted a few days. I'm on a roll now.