I got home from the hospital yesterday, and the surgery went great. He didn't need to open me up through the large cut. He just went in through the hole where the stoma was, reattached everything and then closed that hole. After surgery there was much less pain than last time, although there was still a surprising amount, at least in part because they put me on morphine again which just doesn't work worth a damn for me. After I got them to cancel the morphine and put me on the pain medicine pump with Dilaudid where I can hit a button to control how much pain medicine I'm getting, I started feeling much better.

The next couple days were all about waiting for my intestines to wake up and start moving again. That got a little painful because gas starts to build up and parts of the intestines wake up before others resulting in you feeling like there's a lot going on in there, but nothing is really happening. I did a lot of walking to help speed this process which worked great.

Once everything was awake, I started eating, first liquid only diet, and then quickly moving on to soft foods. Now it's all about trying to figure out how my body wants to process foods and convincing it to do it in such a way that works well for me. My doctor described it as being like a baby learning to walk... things have been rearranged and I need to relearn how eating will affect me and what I need to do to get it to cooperate. My j-pouch only holds about 75 cc's of waste and over the next couple months, it'll supposedly stretch to hold 750 cc's of waste, so working through that process along with learning what and when to eat is the goal of the next couple months. Whereas after the last surgery the recovery was more about physical healing, this recovery is more about adapting and learning the new rules.

As I have said before, healing like this is really helped by walking, so in the hospital I did enough walking for a handful of patients. My surgery was over by 6:00pm and around midnight I was having the nurse walk 3 laps around the floor... a lap is a bit over 300 feet. That was Tuesday night. Saturday mid day I came home so I didn't get any walking in. The 3 days in between though, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I walked a bit over 11.5 miles worth of laps... in a hospital gown dragging an IV pole no less. Many nurses and hospital workers, and even other patients, commented on my walking. When asked what I could do to help things progress faster, doctors and nurses alike said "You're doing all the right things... keep up the walking and it'll happen soon enough."

I even met a really pretty nurse while I was in there that I got along with so well I asked her out despite the fact I was a patient in the hospital and FAR from looking my best. I've met a lot of pretty nurses in hospitals before and my brain was always on top of things enough to know that while you're in there you look like shit and feel like shit and the last thing you should be doing is trying to attract a love interest. She was so cool though that I decided that if I didn't say anything, I'd likely never see her again, so it was worth risking the fact that I was far from looking my best. Turns out she's married. Doh! Swing and a miss! Oh well, at least it's good to know that when I realize the effort is worth it, I'll step up to the plate and make an effort and I won't chicken out. Still, a happy ending would have been cool about now wouldn't it?

Anyway, things haven't all been smooth sailing. I won't go into details, but damn I've been in the bathroom a lot. Trying to figure out what your insides are doing and how to get them to work on your schedule is not an easy task.

-jk