The pain of surgery: It hurts only when I laugh

If you watch or play sports, you know that injuries are inevitable. When you hear that an athlete is having surgery and will be out for a while, you just accept it and move on because it happens so often.

I never thought much about this until I had surgery recently. Let me tell you, when it’s you that is under the knife, you realize that there is nothing at all routine about surgery.

In my case, I had to be at the hospital at the ungodly hour of 5:45 a.m. for an early morning surgical procedure. Thankfully, I had my lovely wife to escort me.

I can’t imagine doing something like this on my own, though I know some are forced to and that’s too bad. After some shaving on my body and then some artistry with a magic marker, I was hooked up to an IV and rolled into the operating room.

The last thing I remember is noticing how really big the light was over the operating table. I was imagining how having a light that big over my garage workbench would make it so much easier to rebuild carburetors when the next thing I knew I was waking up in the recovery room. It was like time travel, for real.

After I was awake for a while, the surgeon came in and told me everything had been a success. This was a routine outpatient procedure and it had gone as smoothly as she had promised. Then she asked me how I felt.

“Well,” I said, giving it some careful thought, “I feel like I’m here and my head is on the other side of the room.”

With that, I was admitted for an overnight stay after all. The thing is, this was the first time I have ever been sedated completely, and I just don’t do well on drugs.

I know some people take drugs to escape reality, but I have enough trouble with reality as it is and drugs only make it worse. When I say that, I’m not even kidding. It really felt like my head was no longer attached to my body, if you can believe that.

I looked forward very much to that overnight stay in the hospital. The food was bland but I was just happy to have anything.

The real problem came with trying to sleep. At first I couldn’t doze off, so I just did lap after lap around the recovery ward, trailing my IV like a pet on a leash.

When I finally did manage to go to sleep, a nurse would come in and tell me she needed to take my “vitals” — pulse, temperature, etc. Then I’d go back to sleep and two hours later the same thing. I was awakened at least three times during the night by nurses making these checks over and over.

How are you supposed to get any rest like this? I guess it’s their subtle way of making sure you don’t get too comfortable so you won’t want to extend your stay.

When I was finally ready to check out the next day, I was pushed in a wheelchair to the curb where my wife was waiting with the car. What’s funny about that is: Why bother with the wheelchair, since once you get out you're on your own, you know? I'd rather have practiced the long walk to the car just to get ready for the recovery, so to speak, but everyone gets the ceremonial wheelchair exit ride, it seems.

With my surgery, I was told to do absolutely nothing, nada, zip, for one whole week. You’d think that would be easy, but I'm not the kind of guy that likes to be waited on or to sit still for too long. I hated to have my family do some of the things I normally do around the house, but there was no way around it.

If you've had surgery, you know what I mean. You feel like a real bump on a log just sitting there all day. It’s terrible. I can’t imagine what pro athletes do when they’re laid up for months at a time.

My surgeon told me I’d have some pain in the first week after the surgery. OK, I guess that’s to be expected. Day one after the surgery was fine. I must have had some pain meds left in me.

Day two and day three were so bad I actually called her up to ask if she had left her scalpel inside of me. Yes, it was that bad. On the one-to-10 scale, where one is getting tickled with a feather and 10 is death, this was a solid seven, close to an eight. I mean I was almost in tears.

Apparently this is par for the course when recovering from surgery. Who knew? So, whenever someone is recovering from an operation, be sure to give them some slack. I would never, never have believed how painful the recovery was if I didn’t experience it firsthand.

In fact, my wife has unfortunately had to have several surgeries. Each time, when the procedure was completed, the doctor would come and find me in the waiting room, slap me on the back, and tell me how great she did. Had I known those times how painful the recovery would be, I would have taken much more time off from work to tend to her. Oh well, you live and you learn (if you're lucky).

With a whole week of nothing to do, you’d think that would be a great time to catch up on movies, TV, reading, and music. The thing is, when you don’t feel good, none of that is really appealing in the way it normally is. You try to get into something but you just can’t do it.

I remember, in the last years of my dear departed mother’s life, asking her to do all sorts of things. I’d get so frustrated when she’d more often than not say no. But she hadn’t felt good for a long time, and now I can fully understand her reluctance to do anything. When you don’t feel good, it's hard if not impossible to get excited about anything. Totally understandable.

After the week was over, I could start walking and lifting things again, but only very light things. I'm not a huge muscled guy, but so many of the things I normally do — rotating car tires, shoveling snow, general work around the house — actually require lifting quite a bit of weight. You don’t realize it until you can’t do it for a while. Heck, even a gallon of milk weighs seven pounds and that was too much. I felt totally useless during that week. Not good.

It’s been six weeks since my surgery and only now am I allowed to start exercising again. Even so, I was told to start slowly and work back into it gradually.

It’s really hard to do that of course, but when you get that wince of pain it kind of forces you to slow down whether you want to or not. I can’t wait until I’m totally pain free and get back to my prior lifestyle.

Like Joni Mitchell sings, “Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Amen sister.

One time a friend told about getting injured playing volleyball. “I tore my rotator cuff. I have to keep my arm in a sling. I'm going to need surgery and miss the rest of the tournament. It’s terrible.”

My other friend then said, “It could have been worse.”

The first friend says, “How could it possibly be worse?”

The second one replies, “It could have happened to me.”

Surgery is no picnic. The next time your favorite ball player, friend, or relative goes under the knife, be aware that it’s just the beginning of a potentially long and painful recovery process.

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