The Shit Is Alright

I arrived home from the hospital that Saturday with nine staples in my stomach and a PT drain – the hand grenade – sticking out of a hole below the surgery incision. I found myself instinctively feeling for the ostomy bag for the first few days, especially at night. The grenade was on my right side this time, which made taking a shower complicated. The left-side drain worked out well with our downstairs shower. I could pin it to the cloth shower curtain and do my business. With the right-side drain, I’d need have my back to the showerhead, sort of like facing the rear wall instead of the doors in an elevator.

The solution? I hung one of Frank’s old leashes from the upstairs curtain rack. Mondo ghetto and hilarious kinky-looking, but functional. Our friend Joey from Austin was staying with us for a few days, bunking with the Abe Lincoln lamp in my office. We’d forgotten to tell him the deal with the leash before he showered. Joey wisely decided not to touch it or speculate too much about its purpose. This launched half an hour of bondage jokes and potential penalties for “getting the leash wet.”

I know I keep using different metaphors to describe the inner-workings of my body and how it’s dealing with the cancer, the ostomy, and recovery. Let me introduce another. For the first week, my bowels behaved like an old motorcycle dragged out of a barn and kick-started for the first time in years. Lots of sputtering, strange noises, and not to be trusted on trips further than a few blocks. I was prepared for this in theory. In theory I’m prepared for a lot of things. I’ll spare you the details, save one. Lisa and I have a couple of dry erase calendars on the fridge to keep track of appointments, deadlines, and obligations. In the middle of that first week I started doing a daily bathroom visit tally. One 24 hour period: 15 hash marks and I stopped counting.

This didn’t stop me from leaving the house or starting work the following Tuesday (yes, it’s from home, but taxing none the less), but made for some miserable days. By Thursday, I managed to get most of a night’s sleep uninterrupted and Friday felt strangely normal. Had things really stabilized? Other than attempting Greek Tacos at Golden West on the Avenue, I’d being blanding my diet up – pasta, rice, bread. Now, decided to open it up. No real issues.

The following Tuesday was my first post-surgery clinic appointment. I wanted three things out this: 1. removal of the PT drain. 2. removal of the staples. 3. Info about the lifting restriction, which was at an annoying 10 pounds. The paperwork we received when I got released said two weeks at 10 pounds, which would be awesome and knowing my surgeon, was probably wildly inaccurate.

When Lisa and I walked out the clinic appointment, it was the first time in four and a half months that I didn’t have foreign object sticking out of or attached to my body. Staples removed and drain pulled. Lifting restriction at 10 pounds for another month, then 20 pounds for a month or so after that.

To say things are stable on the bowel front is probably a 90% accurate statement. Weird shit shit still happens, but I’m comfortable enough to going on longish hikes and to start traveling again for work in the coming week. All in all, not too bad. I have an overwhelming sense of being incredibly fortunate in how this all played out. They found something amiss on Feb 2. Today is August 1. Six months later and I’m cancer-free and within spitting distance to being back to normal.