Happy Anniversary

My surgery was two months ago today. To celebrate, I saw my surgeon and got the butt drain out!!

Wa-hoo!!!!!!!!

There are not enough exclamation points in the world for that. I can now sit comfortably and sleep in my own bed. The only surface soft enough to rest comfortably with the drain is the couch, so I’ve been there or the Giant Recliner for the past five weeks (a hospital bed before that, of course). I moved to the couch once I could sleep flat. I can take a shower! I couldn’t change the dressing on that drain myself (it was some sort of fancy dressing only employed by Interventional Radiology, rather than a normal tape and gauze thing), so I couldn’t get it wet and thus couldn’t shower. I’ve been washing my hair in the kitchen sink and everything else very carefully in the bathtub. I can play with the cats without risking my dangling tubing. I don’t have dangling tubing. I can start doing yoga again. And after a day or two for the hole to heal, I won’t hurt all the time. It already feels enormously better without the tubing or the hard plastic connector under my buttcheek.

Other than that, the surgeon says I’m doing very well. I’ve been at work half-time for the past two weeks, and am planning to start back to full time on December 1. (Why start on a holiday weekend?) I gained two pounds, my incision is well-healed, everything is looking good. I’ve been walking, and walked a whole mile yesterday in our record-setting warm afternoon. (Gaining two pounds is excellent: I lost 25 while in the hospital and immediately thereafter, and it’s taken a while for my appetite and digestive system to return to proper functioning.)

I don’t have to see any of my doctors until 2015. When I talked to my oncologist last week, I was told to go home and fatten myself up, enjoy the holidays, and we’d talk about chemo in January. Once that’s figured out, I see my surgeon in February to make plans for reversing the ostomy, working around the chemo schedule. 2014 isn’t the end of hard-core medical treatments, but barring unpleasant surprises 2015 will be.