The Great Surgical Recap

I don't think the following is really graphic or anything, but it's a little gross.

The first few days were a bit rough.

My surgery went fine with no complications. No excessive swelling or bleeding and what have you, so the Doc said I was good to go back to the hotel after a day and half or so. I had two drains attached to my chest leading to some water bottle looking contraptions.

It wasn't pretty, for sure, and the nurses giggled a little when I put on my hoodie and put the drains in my pocket.

My chest really hurt every time I moved, so I tried to stay lying down a lot. My butt started to ache, so I laid down some extra blankets as padding.

I also started to get pretty nauseous from blood draining back into my stomach from my nose. That lasted about two days. I accidentally dropped my wireless Mighty Mouse into the bucket next to my bed and it stopped working because I didn't realize it was in there until a day later or so.

Oops.

I got the drains taken out on the third day, and I felt like an android or something when she clipped the tubes and I heard a hiss of air like hydraulics. Around this time the nurses (very nice women, by the way) taught me breast massage, which is more like breast compression.

Basically I have to spend about twenty minutes four times a day compressing each breast for the next year. It was really painful the first few days, and I made sure to pop some painkillers about an hour before the nurses showed up, because they were really putting their weight into it.

Speaking of painkillers, they really knocked me out so I stopped using them after the first few days.

Because of all the bandages and the nose trauma, my face went into extra oil production so it was like an oil slick. Pretty gross. After the bandages came off that persisted about a week or so before settling back to normal. It was tough washing my face too, because even though there wasn't any pain usually, it was still pretty sensitive.

A weird thing was three of my front teeth were numb, but if I lightly tapped the bridge of my nose I felt in down in those teeth. Very odd sensation.

The area under my right eye had a purple bruise that faded to yellow and was gone after a week. I tried not to look in a mirror at all for a while, since I kind of get freaked out by stuff like that. When I finally did though, I decided I looked alright and went back to my usual narcissistic primping.

That teeth numbness has started to fade.

Speaking of numbness, I have some around the scars under my armpit. It's hard to tell if that's improving. Let's just say shaving is another odd sensation.

A large part of my left breast is also numb, starting from the nipple down to the fold. I do get the occasional prickly pain though, which I heard are the nerves reconnecting or something. Supposedly in almost all cases feeling comes back within six months, so we'll see how that goes.

Well, there we go- recapped!