Post-op follow-up

For those of you who are curious about how my post-op visit, here's the summary I just emailed to Mike (who is in Chicago doing research this week).

Okay, here's the scoop on the post-op visit I just had:

- My incisions look good. The stomach suture should dissolve/fall out ~4-6 weeks after surgery. (The other sutures are all buried under the skin, but this one my body pushed out for some reason - which apparently isn't anything to worry about.)

- I need to be taking meds for my L aching. Apparently 'aches' still count as pain. (No wonder my pain scale is off! I never considered this to be "pain" but he said it definitely counts.) Given the amount of work he did on that side, he said it wasn't surprising that I was still kind of bruised and sore, and told me take something - if I didn't think I needed Percocet (as if I would take a narcotic for achiness!), he told me I had to at least take Motrin. Craziness.

- Apparently I had a lot of bleeding during the surgery that they had a hard time stopping, so they wrapped my entire uterus in a gauze-like thing that will eventually dissolve. He was glad we went to the ER with my fever after the surgery since he was worried that I had a bleed.

- Endometriosis gets scores to grade severity. My score was 62 (anything over about 40 or so is considered severe). All of my endo was "deep" - the cysts on my L ovary were 2.5 cm and 4cm in size and the cyst on my R ovary was 2 cm. There were lots of adhesions (aka scar tissue) on my L side, not so much on the R. The R side was apparently easy to clean up, but the L side was hard to work around and he couldn't remove all the adhesions.

- There was evidence of inflammation (in response to the endo) basically throughout my entire abdomen (large intestine, bladder, small intestine, etc.). Since inflammation causes infertility (and pain!), he considers the surgery to be very optimistic for improving my fertility (and decreasing my pain!). However, it's very likely that the endo will return in the future (he wouldn't give any specific timeline, just said "very likely"). He encouraged us to have kid(s) ASAP (he really stressed the urgency of this, which kind of freaked me out), then once we're done with kid(s) there are apparently other treatment options beside surgery that we could consider if/when it does come back.

- As for the post-surgical restrictions, he was very serious about telling me to not to do anything for at least 4 full weeks - no running, no yoga, no lifting, no sex - and perhaps longer if I'm still sore on the L. He even discouraged "power walking" (aka "walking at my normal pace") due to the potential impact on my insides, and told me that if I'm going to walk it HAS to be at a slow, leisurely pace. Ugh. He did say I could swim in about a week though, since my incisions are healing so nicely.

- He also showed me some photos of my insides that they took during the surgery! It was a bit weird because I had no idea what I was looking at - he kept trying to orient me to the photos ("and this is your uterus, and here is the cyst, and here is the small intestine" etc.) but everything looked like little blobs to me. I think Mike would have appreciated the pictures more than I did. :)

So that's that! I'm continuing to make progress, but still need to take it slow...