Friday, January 04, 2013
I sometimes want to facepalm in front of my plastic surgeon. For any of my new blog readers I had my excess arm skin removed four months ago and had a revision 3 weeks ago...
My armpit incision on the right side ripped open once the sutures were taken out, so I have to go back and see him once a week until the wound closes. Right now I'm just taking this all with a grain of salt and two Percocet. *literally, the Percocet is necessary.
So today I go in, thinking that it has been feeling better, maybe it doesn't hurt so bad, and the first words out of my doctors mouth are: "hmm.... oh, that's not better." So apparently I have to change up the way we've been treating the wound.
I was changing it twice a day --then he looked at it and said I could go down to once a day. A week later -- I don't know what's changed, but I now need to go up to FOUR bandage changes a day with wet to dry bandages to get rid of the gunk and abrade the wound to increase blood flow and hopefully wound healing.
This basically means I get to do something exceedingly painful four times a day for a week... *yay* (grumpy cat)
Now I don't want to freak anyone out who's thinking about surgery -- my first surgery went off without a hitch. My left arm revision looks fantastic. This is just a fluke. This is one of the random, rare things that can happen anytime you have surgery. I just got lucky.
Today he even mentioned that when this heals we'll see how it looks and we might have to do a scar revision if its too big. For the last two weeks he's been telling me not to worry, it will close, the scar won't be that bad...
Now all of a sudden its that bad. I feel frustrated with all of this. I don't regret the surgery but right now its hard to stay focused on being healthy and making smart food choices when I'm on narcotic pain killers and have an exercise restriction due to the fact that anytime I move or stretch my arm in anyway it hurts. Oh god... even sneezing hurts like a b:tch.
I'm trying to stay positive. I was under 1500 calories yesterday and look to be on goal today if I make smart choices. I think that taking control of my diet will be the best thing I can do. My mom's coming down today to be my bandage nurse since its kinda hard to change an armpit bandage one handed. I was going to manage with it once a day -- but 4 times a day is a lot to ask. Now I just need to make sure that I do not falter with my diet when she's around. She's certainly a bad influence and I let myself make too many exceptions when she's around. She even complained that I didn't have any tasty food in my house -- no duh -- there's no chocolate here unless you want diet cocoa. No cookies to munch on -- no chips. Its aaaaaalllll healthy.
So that's that. My arm is gross. It hurts. I'm grumpy. But I'm watching my diet like a hawk, and hopefully the scale will improve and go down.