My Confinement, Day 6

I'm beginning to think of this enforced inactivity in those terms: a confinement. Isn't that what women used to have to endure at the end of a pregnancy? Or was it every month when they had their period? I just associate that term with women being segregated from society for a length of time because of what people used to euphemistically term "female troubles" (though I've heard that phrase again since I've been back in the South).

I've been off the pain med and muscle relaxant now for about 36 hours. I'd been tapering down but decided I didn't really need them any more at all yesterday, so I didn't take any last night. I switched back to my usual OTC sleep med (as I believe I've mentioned here before, I have horrible insomnia) and slept fairly well, though it took me a good two hours to get fully asleep. One reason I wanted to get those meds out of my system was that they gave me the worst case of constipation I've ever had. My cousin Karen warned me about this, and she should know: She's had literally dozens of major surgeries as a result of a terrible car collision she miraculously survived in the late 1970s. She is now in the process of having one of her legs pretty much completely rebuilt with the goal that it will finally be the same length as her other leg and stop causing her to have so much back and neck pain. Anyway, she emailed me and warned me about this side effect of painkillers and advised me to ask for stool softeners at the hospital, and though I believed her, I didn't want to take a medication that I might not need, so I didn't ask for anything. Now I SO wish I had. I really had no idea what constipation felt like until a couple of days ago. Five days without a BM can definitely leave one feeling incredibly icky. I'll say that the problem is better now and leave it at that :).

My arm seems a bit less swollen and painful today, but it was still so bad yesterday that I paged my surgeon again. He seemed annoyed by my page, which frankly annoyed me, but of course I apologized profusely for bothering him. He said the only thing he could advise me to do was go to the ER, where they would likely do a CT scan of my arm to be sure there wasn't a blood clot. That seemed a bit extreme to me, so I decided to wait until today to try to get over to see him in person. Unfortunately, I forgot that a plumber is coming by to inspect the installation of our new hot water heater (I guess my landlady installed it; maybe the inspection by a professional is a city regulation?). We don't know what time the plumber is supposed to be here. All they would say is sometime today. So if I can't get over to see the surgeon today, we will just keep our appointment we had with him for tomorrow. He's not going to take the drain out, though. I asked him again what are the criteria for the removal of the drain, and he said less than 30cc of liquid total per day for three days in a row. I'm still empyting this thing every twelve hours and getting between 20cc and 30cc each time. My guess is that the earliest it will come out is the end of the week if I'm very, VERY lucky. But probably Monday :((((((.

So without the pain med to make me sleepy, I've been awake and alert during the day, which means more time to get bored. Yesterday I played WoW for a little while but my arm was hurting too much to be on the computer for very long, so I ended up watching TV. A lot of TV. We don't have cable or satellite service, so anything we watch has to be through our Apple TV or Netflix (disks or streaming via the Xbox 360). I had saved up several episodes of "Mad Men" and watched all of them, plus several more of "Freaks and Geeks." I like Mad Men a lot, but Kyle's not crazy about it -- he says Don Draper has no redeeming qualities, and he can't stand Peter Campbell. I feel the same way about some series that he likes (in particular, Battlestar Galactica -- not a single character worth caring about on that one), but no biggie. So I watched TV by myself for quite a while because Kyle was sleeping for a good part of the day. (He, sadly and unfortunately, picked up a bad cold somewhere. I pray I don't get it.) I love Freaks and Geeks, too; it reminds me so much of my high school days. I watched an episode last night in which the first mention of punk was made. It showed Nick getting ready to go to a punk club and ripping up his clothes, putting safety pins everywhere, lol. Oh, how well I could relate to and remember that. There was one time Kim Hill and I were going somewhere, I don't remember where -- a party, maybe? -- and we spiked our hair, did new-wave/punk makeup, and wore black plastic trash bags as tops.

I guess I'm going to fire up my work laptop and see whether I can get the VPN client running so that it will work just as if I'm there. If so, I'm going to try to get some work done. There's really no reason not to. I think I can log at least half a day's worth of hours today. I should probably call Suzanne and make sure that's OK, or at least tell her that's what I'm doing. Perhaps she'll have something in particular that she wants me to work on.

I just looked back over the blog and realized that I hadn't summarized what Dr. Brian told me the day after surgery. I guess my head's been too foggy. She said that after they removed the sentinel node and found that it was positive, they removed a bunch more (22 total, I believe) and found that five were affected. She said that this will likely mean six months of chemo followed by four to six weeks of radiation, which is somewhat confusing to me since she had earlier said that it's rare to get radiation if one has a mastectomy (but my mom had both). I guess all will be explained by the oncologist, Dr. Krekow; I have an appointment with her on September 21. Frankly, I'm trying not to think too much about the chemo. It scares me.