Rough Times

It's been a rough, hard ten days since my surgery. Surgeons removed a mass the size of a baseball on my pancreas along with half my pancreas, my spleen, and some lymph nodes. The pathology report is not back yet, but my surgeon took clear margins, just in case, and thinks I will not be dealing with cancer treatments. Good news!

It's the hardest surgery I have ever had, and even though I did a lot of prep work ahead of time, it has still knocked me flat. (I can't help but wonder what I would feel like had I not prepared my body so well.)

I've  had so many ports and IVs that it seemed like everywhere I looked, there was some sort of tube. I lost track of how many I actually had.

 And there has been heavy bruising everywhere.

My sugar spiked at almost 400 and then bounced up and down for several days which meant I was getting finger sticks every two hours and insulin shots in my belly.

Fortunately my blood sugar has normalized as my pancreas has healed.

Tough as it was, I had excellent care during my six days in the hospital - everyone from the nurses, techs, food service, and custodians were kind and caring. If I rang the bell for a nurse, someone was there almost immediately.

One nurse even drew me a cute elephant to cheer me up. I had them leave it there my entire stay.

I'm home now and continuing to heal. I'm eight days post-op as I write, and I am moving around the house and even sitting out on our patio. Taking lots of naps throughout the day, but I am needing fewer as the days go by.  I haven't made it upstairs to my horse room yet as those stairs are too much for me at the moment, but I hope to do so in a day or two.