Homecoming #3

  The first few days of being home were quite an adjustment.  Getting enough rest, discovering I wasn't as strong and pain free as I thought.  I was taking oxycodone twice a day for pain, and boy did it work.  It wasn't too long before I had a pretty good habit going and I liked it.  Cindy, my wife, referred to oxycodone as that "monkey on your back".  Remember she and my daughter, Michelle, are  also unofficial pharmacists.   I was taking a lot of  medication, like 16 prescription pills daily.  Again Cindy came to my rescue, she realized I would have taken the morning stuff at night, mid-day pills morning and afternoons and so forth and so on, probably would have needed to be stomach pumped a couple of times a week for overdose. She had it all worked out for me, pills organized laid out in handy little containers and labeled, just follow the simple instruction is all that was required of me.  For those of you who have been through this you can see the importance of having first of all an advocate in the hospital. Somebody has got to deal with the Nurse Ratcheds and you're in no condition.  Next a good administrator.  Once home, doctors' office appointments start almost immediately, at least a couple a week, in my case anyway.  Prescriptions have to be filled, picked up, organized, and properly taken.  This goes on for 3 or 4 weeks as things begin to slowly return to normal, and I wasn't sure things really would. Was this going to be normal for me from now on?  You probably wondered the same thing,  were we going to be doomed to taking large doses of medication, monitoring our blood pressure and sitting on the sofa with a remote  control in hand. I quickly got rid of the monkey Cindy had told me about.
   It is approximately 100 yards from my door down to where my drive meets the street.  I took it as a personal challenge after being home for a few days to walk out each morning and get the newspaper. I would have to stop twice going down and once coming back to rest.  It took a week before I could do it round trip with no stops.  Next I challenged myself to extend further out down the street another one hundred fifty yards. Twice a day morning and afternoons I eventually could do it, non stop.  I know it sounds silly, like what's the big deal, but that's what you go through.
    I was on top of the weight loss, eating lots of fruits, vegetables, grains, soups, salads, chicken.  I had continued losing weight and was down to 195.  I was eating healthy, liked it, was confident this was no diet, this was permanent.  I vowed to myself I was going to begin to exercise to strengthen my heart. I was going to regain my overall strength and stamina.  I wanted to go back to normal.

  My first doctors' appointment was to my cardiovascular surgeon.  He is a pretty neat and likable guy, has a great reputation as a surgeon, and is known for a nice, neat incision leaving minimal scar tissue, and the same for vein removal from your leg. It gets better, he likes to big game hunt, and wears cowboy boots in surgery.  Me too, the big game hunting, but I took my boots off during surgery. Problem is I didn't want a little scar left.  At my first appointment he made a big thing of the incision, how well it was healing. "Man you're hardly going to even know it's there, you'll look great at the beach".  I finally told him,  I appreciate it, but I kind of wanted one of those zig zag wide ugly looking scars.  You know the kind I could show off,  tell my buddies look what happens when Dr. Frankenstein is your heart surgeon.  I'm not sure he saw the humor.  He gets serious and explains that I've got a lung problem.  "You need to be at the hospital tomorrow morning."

  In the next post we'll discuss losing weight, foods I ate, changes I made as I went along.