This Broken Mess of a Life

So, it's been 6 months since my surgery! Seems like a good time for a little update.

Some notes on my recovery up to this point: I had my 3 month follow up last week ( which, technically, was more like 3 months and two weeks ) and my doctor said things looked " Awesome ". As usually, that was a HUUUUGE relief to hear. I'm an anxious person by nature ( working on that ) and so the entire time between my first post-op x ray and the one last week I was just worried " oh the hardware is shifting " or " what if it's not fusing "....but it's all going well! PHEW! It's made me really grateful that I got strong and healthier prior to surgery. Looking back several years, when I first had the idea of surgery and my doctor at the time said " You're too young, no one will operate on you ", I'm actually grateful for that. I think my recovery would have been much harder if I was weaker and heavier. The first week, especially, would have been so much rougher if I had been weaker. I can't even imagine what those f...

Spinal Fusion Surgery – L5S1 Fusion Surgery Day I’ve never really written in much detail about my surgery day and all the specifics about being in the hospital so I thought I’d spell all that out for anyone curious or wondering what it’s like.

Another topic I was wondering about prior to my surgery and that I've seen a lot of discussions started about is medications during recovery. What do you get, how much do you get, and are you going to get addicted. In my first few cursory searches about meds after surgery, I got really concerned about addiction. Getting put on narcotic pain killers for months didn't sound appealing to me. In my case, most of the commonly prescribed pain killers make me vomit. Through trial and error over the past few years, I learned that Percoset won't make me barf. But that's all I had experience with. Let me take a few steps back.....

Ok, maybe the title of this is misleading. Because, the first week or two of pain was really terrible. But I'm 4 1/2 weeks out now. And I'm going a little crazy. It's been over a month of log rolling out of bed and having to ask people to pick up my phone when I drop it. A month of walking really slow and getting tired really easily. A month of watching my family do all the chores....dishes, laundry, cleaning the bathroom. Maybe that sounds good, but for an OCD, Type A mom like myself, at this point it's kind of torture. I can't clean up after myself. I can't pitch in with the house hold cleaning. I can't organize my closet or spring clean the kitchen. And it's stupid little things too. I can't put on jeans, because they waist band kills my scars and I can't make my body do what it needs to do to get into jeans anyways. I can't cuddle with my husband at bedtime or my kids on the couch because I can't twist or bend. And when I'm ...

I honestly didn't research this surgery as much as I normally research things before hand. Mostly out of fear. And, I honestly am glad I did it that way. I would have been far more scared about the surgery if I'd watched videos first. But there are a few things I wish I'd known before going into this. One of them was how your bowels handle surgery and pain meds.   When I was done with surgery, one of the things they asked me was if I wanted stool softeners or laxatives.  At the time, I had attempted one time to get out of bed once and it was torture so I declined the poop meds. I didn't want to get caught having to rush to the bathroom when I didn't feel capable of doing that. Oh, what a mistake. The thing I didn't really take into consideration or know much about was how hard core pain killers really stop you up. I'd never had surgery before, nor had I ever been on that level of pain meds for any extended period of time. I started taking the ...