I am writing in a very self-obsessed way following enquiries as to how I am.
What a very lengthy performance. It is three weeks today since the surgery. I can walk a few steps before I need to sit down.
The OH joined in. I’d been home a day, when he announced he had occult blood and had sent samples in and might be ill. It was nothing. Then he threw himself into archery, causing one step down from a detached retina with flashing lights, a drive to the next big hospital, an argument about the booking process and a return the following day in an expensive taxi after looking at me slumped in a chair and wondering if I could drive him. It has gone away.
The previous day the OH came in from the garden and thought I was dead and the day before that he shouted at me because I nearly cried, I was so weak.
However, he has been doing the shopping and the washing and the gardening. He has not been drinking the bad news away which is an improvement on when I had the cancer diagnosis.
The District nurses have been helpful and are now down to twice a week and hoping to get rid of me as soon as I am able to sit in a car, get out, walk into the surgery and report to the practice nurse, which I could not do yet.
The main reason for all the nurses is the leak.
About two days home, I stood up in the loo and realised everything was wet. The wound had produced a couple of pints of foaming fluid all over the floor. A nurse was sent for and and pronounced it a partial hissage. This is a thing when a wound opens up. Fortunately she had seen it before, got on the phone and mopped me up and dressed the wound.
This has continued ever since seven or eight times in twenty four hours. Not as much in quantity and slowly decreasing, I think or hope. The nurses bring absorbent dressings, I have bought some expensively, online. No one knows what to expect because no one knows anyone who has had scar tissue from 1959 removed before. The surgeon said he had never seen anything like it, the appendix scar was like the baddie scar master pinning the front of me to the back of me with every other scar wound in and out of it strangling my intestines.
The stuff coming out of me is the most amazing red gold colour. It’s the colour you would paint a dragon. It looks like life force. It actually sparkles.
Although it has been horrific, this undoubtedly needed to happen. There are benefits already.
For several years my face has been getting spottier. Over the last year I’ve had weeping pustules all over my chin. My navel had leaked for several months. The only way I could make my innards work was an hour on the twist stepper, a pint of tea and then pummelling my stomach.
All of that is swept away. There was even a thing like a mole but scaly, near my eye, that has just disappeared. My fingernails are wonderful.
It remains to be seen what next and if the benefits hold steady and when the leak will just stop.
Could it be that I will return to 1958 and start skipping and building snowmen?
One thing is certain. You are your intestines. Who knew?
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