I’m going to be deeply and painfully honest in this one. There will be talk of suicidal ideation. It’s going to be dark. If you’re not up for that, I recommend that you skip this one. I’ll even summarize the post: life sucked really bad for a while.
I mentioned in the previous entry that I was not given a prescription for pain medication. I don’t know why this was. It could have been that the doctor just didn’t remember to and I, being new to all of this, didn’t know it would be needed. In any case, I was sent home medicated only by steroids.
The first few days were predictably rough. You expect things to be bad after surgery, so I was, for the most part, still mentally okay. I used ice packs and Tylenol (ibuprofen, being an NSAID, was strictly forbidden) but they really did not do much. I thought things would ease up after the initial recovery period. I expected a reprieve.
It did not come.
The thing about AVMs is that when they are damaged in any way, they regrow aggressively. This thing was an enraged hydra under my skin and we’d just cut off two of its heads. It hurt. It hurt in ways that I can’t even put into words, the 1-10 scale was irrelevant. Any stimuli on or near my head was agony. I could not sleep because I could not lay my head down.
After several days of being in agony and getting no sleep, I was understandably losing my grip. This was Hell with no end in sight. I remember being awake in the early hours of the morning with my laptop, venting to friends on the other side of the Earth. I remember saying that I didn’t know if treatment was worth it, if this was how it was going to be.
I was starting to grasp for a permanent solution to what was a temporary problem. I have to tell you now that if you find yourself in a position like this, please reach out for help. I didn’t, and I suffered for much longer than necessary.
Thankfully, I didn’t act on my darker impulses. It was a few weeks until my followup appointment, but once I was there I told the doctor how much pain I was in. He prescribed me Percocet, and it made a world of difference. We also scheduled my next surgery, April 7 2011, with the complete removal tentatively scheduled for April 10 2011.
The Percocet was such a help that I was able to live a mostly normal life between procedures. I went out with my friends, I went to parties, I went to the zoo.
In the next entry, we’ll talk about my next few procedures (summarized, since you know the details now).
On the other side of the scar... 