"Up and at 'em, George McFaddem!"

Good morning and greetings from a very happy post-op patient. Let's break it down, bit by bit, and then you should pop a bottle or something.

• I slept last night-- two full shifts of about 3 hours each! This is awesome. It was really difficult to get comfortable last night-- poor Jan, hauled out of her comfy, warm AeroBed, fighting a losing battle with my pillows, the requisite 30-degree angle at which I was supposed to sleep, and my at-that-point low level of functioning painkiller-- took forever to find a position before we kind of looked at each other like, "Yeah, let's just come to terms with the fact that real comfort is just n0t an option." Anyway. I eventually dozed off, got vitals and more meds around 4, and then slept soundly until 7. I believe the correct term is "Hells, yes." I tend to be a good sleeper, so not being able to do the passed few nights was really frustrating especially since that's probably when the body does a great majority of its healing. (Katie? Testify?)

• Dr. S. paid me a lovely morning visit and we talked about getting discharged, and here's where the awesome really begins to take shape. a) the post-op MRI showed no more tumor, so the extraction was fully successful as far as they can determine. A nice clean MRI-- what a beautiful thing...b) O.R. scrubs are a very good look for Dr. S....c) I am being discharged later this afternoon!!...c) aside from the guidelines set forth for me by Slavica (we call her The Sergaent), the occupational therapist, I am under doctor's orders to sleep in any position with only my comfort as the limit! (This excites me because I'm a side sleeper anyway, and this whole 30-degree-angle-only-on-my-back bullshit is played out!) And he said any movement I make follows that as well. I can't run, dance or jump, still can't get back to krav maga or my MMS training, I need to further postpone my contract with Cirque du Soleil, but I can take walks and maybe get Coach Mofo to give me some non-weight-bearing exercises. Squats, lunges, leg lifts-- OMG, how good will it feel to get a little burn going?! But, no halo, no neck brace-- my spine is intact and will be its own protection while I heal. I am going to start crying again because this absolutely amazes me. (As I told my friend, Andy, earlier...I am on a veritable hair-trigger for happy tears. My awesome PCA right now, Rashida, was talking about me being discharged, and I got teary-eyed because she was so great to me, and made me laugh, and apparently some of her other patients are complete douchebags to her...I swear, if I was medically allowed to, I'd easily throw down on Rashida's behalf. And last night, I was G-chatting with a friend in Atlanta, and through my tears I told her that all I wanted was to get better so I could go to Atlanta, hug her and her 100% awesome boyfriend as tight as I want, and thank them for making this whole week better. Yeah, crying because I wanted to hug my friends. Give me a f'ing break. This rawness is doing zero-nothing for my street cred...I am all for expressing oneself but I'm quickly turning into the worst possible cliche.)
  
• I've had a few bouts of what is called "break-through pain"...that's when the pain is more acute than the regular stuff and isn't remedied by the regular painkiller, or maybe when the regular stuff has worn off. Anyway, BTP really f-ing sucks when you're on oral painkillers because while they last longer, their efficacy is slower to present. My doctors gave me orders for small doses of IV morphine for BTP, and I've had to use that once last night. (This is hard-- morphine does hilarious stuff and I could be having a wild time with that business-- but again, I am deathly afraid of narcotics/opiates and their addictive properties. Oh, Van Vondo and your intense Intervention... know that you're reaching a larger audience and they love you like crazy...hahaha.) Anyway, I had a comforting realization that makes me feel a bit daft that I didn't notice or heed it before. So, my pain is caused/increased when I tense my shoulders (maybe the trapezoid muscles? deltoids?)-- if something starts to hurt, I automatically contract those muscles, and when I do that, it's pulls on my incision causing more pain. Jan was helping me change my shirt this morning and the fabric swept gently over the incision site...I gasped because she may as well have taken a spike paddle directly from the 7th circle of hell and smacked me with it, and Jan just about had a heartattack from my reaction. But, here's the lesson...after the initial holy-shit-I-am-going-to-die-RIGHT-NOW moment, I breathed and made a conscious effort to release the muscles surrounding the insicion, and that really helped. I went from a 8 or 9 out of 10 pain-wise, to maybe a 6 or 7, just by actively releasing those muscles. This may seem insignificant, but I'm comforted by these little things. I'm starting to shape my arsenal and strategy for dealing with everything once I go home and start to rebuild the empire. And learning these skills, whether they are practical or palliative in nature, enable me to be an agent in my own recovery. For so long, I couldn't do anything to heal myself, and that lack of participation in my own case was a major contributor to the overall shittiness. So, yes, this growing sense of agency and self-reliance-- I am down with it.
• I had one last session with the physical therapist-- good times on the stairs. The occupational therapist was here earlier and she gave me some fun take-home tools for my recovery...I have to take some pictures of this stuff because it's too funny for mere words. Let's leave it at this: I could annoy the HELL out everybody really quickly with one of the tools. Oh, the mind reels. I can already tell that my mom's evil eye is starting to fix on the one called The Reacher. (I can already anticipate making jokes about reach-arounds...hahahhahaha!!!)
  
• Ok, so my recovery schedule: upon leaving the hospital today (I've got to figure out a different word than "discharge"...it's already too much seventh-grade-health-class humor that my cervical spine was surgered...), I'll be staying at my grandma's on the west side of Cincinnati for the weekend. And then, if all goes well, my mom will be bringing me back to the Mitten on Sunday or Monday, for a few weeks of intensive healing under the supervision of mater and pater. Then the post-op appointments begin after the first of March, and I should be back in Cincinnati ready to get moving again. That is the plan for right now.

I wish everyone the kind of Thursday I'm having (aside from the pain)-- hugs and highfives to all of you. And let me reiterate-- if you're on the receiving end of a thank-you card from me, be ready to laugh. My handwriting is AWESOME...it's like I'm dysgraphic. It's not like cute-quirky-messy, it's like, "I think Dana might've developed cerebral palsy"-level messy. Something to look forward to.