Health Matters

“The first wealth is health.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

On Tuesday morning at 11 am, I went in for some fairly major surgery. On Wednesday morning at 11 am I was back home sitting in the lazy boy chair I’m sitting in right now and have been sitting in most of the time since. The hospital is certainly the safest place to be for surgery but believe me it’s certainly not the best place to be to begin your healing journey. Although the people who looked after me and the care I received was wonderful spending the night there was like spending the night in the middle of a freeway.

There were six of us coming out of surgery laying on stretchers/gurneys crammed into a tiny room, our privacy occasionally protected by draw curtains, everyone of us with monitors beeping, lights flashing, heart rates recording, IV’s poles with feed bags slowly dripping into out veins and tubes draining the liquids out of the other end. There were staff members rushing back and forth trying to make us as comfortable as they could, busy recording temperatures and BP’s, administering pain relievers to alleviate any discomforts we had, their voices echoing back and forth across our spaced out heads just coming out of anaesthesia. Coming from our quiet little no TV, no radio, two person home, I felt nauseated and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. For me the whole commotion was just too much.

This is my second Cystocele repair and hopefully my last. I don’t plan on doing this again anytime soon or for that matter ever again! The first time I had this surgery done was about three years ago and at that time there were two surgeons working on me to bring about four other different procedures including a hysterectomy.

This surgery Cystocele repair alone is certainly not as extensive a surgery as the first one I had but the precautions are basically the same. DO NOT – absolutely DO NOT lift anything heavier than a pound of butter for at least 6 weeks and then nothing that would be considered heavy anytime after that. And for how long do I have to be careful I ask. Forever I am told.

That’s a harsh one for me. Not lifting anything heavy. What’s too heavy? I don’t consider anything heavy. I just lift it or find a way to somehow. I’ve always been rather proud of being able to do things for myself without calling in some extra troops but it looks like this is the end of that story. No more muscle exertion unless I want to find myself heading for surgery again and that’s not bloody likely. I don’t want to always be sitting in a recliner waiting for my insides to heal so I can get on with my life.

The sitting in the recliner isn’t bad it’s the readjusting my thinking I have to get used to. That’s the tough part. Sure brings me back to being focused and thinking about every move I make. It’s hard for someone like me who almost since the beginning of time has had to disassociate myself from my body in order to survive and later has had to learn the exact opposite. Learning to bring focus to my body is like learning a foreign language. It takes a lot of concentrated effort to stay on track and not slip back to what I’m used to.

As I was writing this I decided to go Google the word Cystocele just to make sure I had the right spelling and wouldn’t you know it the search came up with a video of this surgery on You Tube so I thought what the heck, Dr. Benoit explained it to me some but this might give me a better idea of what it is he really did. There are some things we’re really better off not knowing the details of. That would explain why I am feeling like my insides are a little mangled. You think!

No lifting. No pushing. No heaving. No weights. No muscle building or demonstrations of any kind. Okay. I got it! Sitting on my tush (a sore one at that) I’m working myself towards an acceptance of this and a realization that maybe this is another message from the Universe telling me the only muscles I’m allowed to lift, push, pull and build are my writing muscles so I might as well pick up my pen and follow it where it is it will take me. Which right now I believe is to acknowledge that “the first wealth is health,” so I'm really working on behaving myself.