« surgery bound | Main | healing bones take time »
September 19, 2006
get your surgery on
So yesterday i had my surgery. It was a day long process, involving a lot of waiting in doctor's offices, waiting rooms, pre-op rooms, and post-op recovery rooms. throughout the course of the day i began to think that i should have just skipped the surgery and let my collar bone heal on it's own, but then i'd cough and this fierce pain would stab me in the muscles of my upper right back. this wasn't where the bone was broken exactly, and while the swelling and pain from the actual break had gone down over the course of the week, this distinct back pain had grown worse. i found ths troubling, and as i rolled into surgery i was hoping that everything wouldn't hurt as bad when i came out.
The surgery was expected to take 1.5 hours, but it ended up taking 3. This was because once the surgeon opened me up, he discovered that there were many more bone fragments in there then the x-ray had let on. What i am most grateful about is that he discovered that what was causing me at least as much pain as the broken collarbone itself was the fact that one of the bone fragments has perforated my trapezius shoulder muscle. it was this that was causing me all the pain when i sneezed and coughed and tried to sleep and move around. he gently worked that fragment out (it took him more then 30 minutes to do just that), and then he put a titanium plate in there to hold the major collar bone segments together.
A funny thing was that in the post op room, when i was waking up from the anesthesia, my father first spoke to me in spanish, so he and i had a conversation in spanish as i was coming around, and it felt pretty natural.
now i feel much better, plus the fact that i'm still tanked up on the anesthesia that's left in my system, and a new prescription for vicodin. I plan on returning to SF either tomorrow evening or maybe on thursday, depends on how i'm feeling. I feel quite lucky to have had all the support from my family and from my friends through all of this, i owe you all a debt of gratitude.
Posted by bendan at September 19, 2006 01:41 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://drewish.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1439