Radiators and Drains

It's nearly seven weeks since my liver surgery. 

The hosepipe in my side which was draining bile/yellow stuff/bile/nothing/yellow stuff periodically was finally extracted this week. The man said, "Ooh, it's longer than I thought" as he was pulling it out. Hmmm. I'm terrible at measurements, but it was about the length of a standard wooden spoon handle. Pity I didn't get to whack him on the backside with it afterwards. 

I felt bloody great the day it came out. I felt quare as bejaysus the next day. It was like someone had suddenly removed a very stiff corset. My poor back, which is crook at the best of times, got very put out by the change in circumstances. My "core muscles" have left the building, and may never return. My scar is high up on my abdomen, curving from my xiphisternum to my iliac crest (breastbone to hip, non-medicals). Fans of the Great British Sewing Bee know that cutting across the grain of a fabric causes no end of trouble, and my muscles have been sliced diagonally and sideways and skew-ways, and have puckered like a badly sewn gusset. 

"Six weeks" is what I always say to people when they ask how long it takes for a body to heal after surgery. I say this regardless of what kind of surgery they have. I say this, thinking in my head, "6 weeks for wusses, 3 weeks for me." But it turns out that removing the big half of a vital organ is a bit much for a poor little human to deal with. Even a stubborn, allegedly resilient, one. 

I wrote after my bowel surgery about how I'd lost my mojo. 
Ah, the naivety of the laparascopee. There was me thinking that just because I'd had a foot or two of bowel removed, that I had somehow experienced the full whack of Major Abdominal Surgery. 
That was like a trip to the chiropodist compared to this. 
No keyhole fancy-dancery this time. The boyos must have had been up to their elbows in me, scraping bits of liver off major blood vessels, wrestling with mangled tumours. They even got the radiologist man to come and have a poke around with his ultrasound machine while I was panned out. No wonder it took six and a half hours. And five grams of haemoglobin. And seven weeks of aching recovery. 

The hardest thing about being debilitated for so long is that you start to believe it. You start thinking this is as good as I can be. You have people telling you how great you are to be up and about, or looking so well. You have people lifting your bags for you, or getting you to sit down all the time, or asking if you slept okay. These are all lovely kind things, but they are a bit addictive. Our little brains are very clever at holding on to the things that make us feel good and safe and protected. They make us run away from the things that challenge us. 

I was left alone to mind my own children this weekend. I was the sole adult in charge overnight, for the first time in months.
I had a panic attack after about an hour. 
I think most people know what a panic attack feels like, but for those who don't, it is basically a bombardment of physical symptoms that make you feel like you are going to die, but obviously you don't actually keel over. 
Which is all well and good, except when you have a medical history that makes it reasonably likely that you could be having a bombardment of medical symptoms that mean you ARE about to die.
I was able to talk myself down from it, and avoided calling the cavalry and/or ambulance. 
And then I felt about a million times better. 
I realised, you know what, I am actually capable of being me, doing the kind of things that Me is good at, lifting my own bags, getting up off my arse, sleeping or not sleeping and not caring either way.  



There are two kinds of people in life, radiators and drains.


I had become a drain.


Personally, I prefer radiators.