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Hello everyone. I did post post-op, but I suppose this almost became my pre-surgery thread for a while so it might be the best place to update now. Not because I like to whine but because people were thinking of me and might not want me to just vanish into limbo.
As I think I said elsewhere (a Late Shift I added to), I was apparently a tougher and longer job than the docs anticipated. The surgeon came to see me on Saturday morning and treated me to another faint-inducingly gruesome run-down of exactly what they'd done, and how bad it had looked beforehand. I could, of course, see for myself how bad it looked afterwards. Eye swimming in blood, face ballooned out on one side from the intra-oral incision, steristrips plastered over stitches, stuck down with gunk. In my face, mesh, pins, metal plates.
You know on moisturiser adverts, where they insist that the skin around and under the eye is so delicate it needs special treatment, with super-expen ointments designed just for that area, and very, very light patting with the tip of your little finger as you smooth the stuff in? That's where I was cut open. Perhaps the most sensitive square inch of skin on your whole body (though I can think of alternatives). So you can imagine ~ that smarts.
For some reason too they left the plastic "tap" in the back of my hand and the drip in the back of my wrist for 20 hours, so when they wrenched these inch-long tubes out of my veins on Saturday morning that kind of hurt too. The shower I tried to have half an hour later, one-handed, trying to avoid the reflection of my face in the mirror, was perhaps the most miserable shower of my life.
So for two days now ~ it's hard to keep track of time ~ I have been pretty much hurting. Clogging my body up with antibiotics and painkillers, which seem to make everything taste bitter.
I came to a realisation. I'd been telling myself it would all be sorted out on Thursday, that I only had to wait until Thursday. Face caved in? All be fixed on Thursday. Constant pressure and numbness against the nose? All over on Thursday. I was telling myself that as soon as I went into hospital, it would be over.
I had to tell myself that, I can see. Thinking of it as a two-week process with the Thursday deadline was something I could deal with.
I looked at a calendar last night and realised that all those white, blank days from the 1st of the month up until now were wiped out because of this. And then that all those white blank days until the end of the month were wiped out, too. That September 2006 had been decimated. That my September 2006 had been
turned
into
shit.
Then the thought I had pushed away nudged back: that individuals, other human beings had turned a whole month of my life into shit. That this had been done to me, by people.
I'd been pushing that away because there was no point in anger ~ it was helpless, victim's anger. I pushed it away again. There is no point in entertaining the thought. I'd been thinking of this thing that had happened to me as if it was a force of nature, an act of god, instead of something three human beings did to me. I went back to thinking of it that way. There is no advantage in the alternative.
Last night I considered: this month, this event, might be a decisive landmark in most people's lives, if it happened to them. It was an incident of turning-point, life-changing proportions. I had been playing it down (over in a fortnight, fixed by Thursday) and dealing with it that way. I had been getting through it. But the scale of it ~ my face reconstructed with metal, during 3-4 hours of surgery ~ a whole month written off... my eye almost destroyed... the scale of it was starting to stretch around me, as if I'd discovered its true perspective. I think my bloody eye watered then, with shock and self-pity.
But things always look worse at night.
Today I am getting through it again, hour by hour. |
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I jest. Thanks again. I will probably come back here and turn it into my whinging... "blog" again at some point.