The Appendectomy and Recovery so far

When I went into the OR on Sunday night, I was pretty surprised by the fact that even though appendectomies are simple procedures, the OR looks just like it does for any other surgery--those huge bowl-shaped lights over the table, 5 or 6 people working on me, etc.

I also was a bit surprised. They were going to have me keep my pants on and they'd take them off while I was asleep. One of the other nurses thought that was stupid and said I should just take them off right then.

I am not a very big exhibitionist, but this stay in the hospital has made me a lot more comfortable in my own skin, I guess. I have to be careful to be modest now, especially since it feels better to not have the band of pants right on my surgery area.

Anyway, back to the story...I couldn't wear my glasses into the OR, and since my vision is so bad, I was pretty confused. Once they put the General Anesthesia in my IV, they said, "Your vision will probably be getting blurry pretty soon."

I didn't really notice much of a change, since it was so bad in the first place.

Anyway, I fell asleep and then woke up in the recovery room. I never saw the surgeon, anesthesiologist, or any of the OR nurses again.

They took me to my regular room. My roommate was a 40-ish man who had a heart attack on Friday. He snored a lot. I slept pretty well that night. I had to get up a few times to go to the bathroom, they woke me up twice to take my vitals, once I woke up from the other guy snoring, and once I woke up because of the pain. That led to my first experience with Vicodin. I had a couple small doses of Morphine and 1 Vicodin pill. I felt a little better. The next day they gave me 1 morphine dose and 1 pill.

I have been prescribed Vicodin on 2 other occasions (for wisdom teeth, and for a really bad ear infection in High School), but I never took any.

One of the nurses also thought that my working on the field could have helped cause the appendicitis.

At 10:30 AM on Monday they told me I'd be going home, but I didn't get out of there until 1:30. The nurses didn't all know what was going on. My surgeon was working in another building, so she called another surgeon to come and give me the post-op spiel.

I was sent home without antibiotics, and the only instructions were: don't try to move a piano, don't swim (although showering is totally fine).

That afternoon, I was carrying 3 books from one room in the house to another, and it made my side hurt a lot. So I have decided against carrying very much at all.

Monday wasn't too bad, but Tuesday led to a lot of pain, especially last night when I had a 101 degree fever, which I wrote about in couple of the other blogs (fever | recovery).

This morning I had a bit of a fever again, and I just took some Milk of Magnesia to counteract the side effects of the Vicodin on my GI tract.

The next blog will have my thoughts from the whole process including my fear of dying, getting over it, and things I've learned.