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Part 1: My History, Pre-Surgery
Part 2: Surgery and the Hospital

Part 3: After the Surgery

I was at home for five weeks of recuperation before I went back to work. I remember when I looked at my post-surgery scar for the first time: I hadn’t been able to do so in the hospital, so the first day I was home I went into the bathroom with a hand-held mirror to make my first up-close examination.

I could tell immediately that my shoulder blades were lined up the way they were supposed to be, which was both wonderful and strange. The other thing that I noticed right away was, of course, the scar. Bright red and still fresh, it started between my shoulder blades and extended nearly all the way down my back. They had used dissolvable stitches underneath the skin (so I never had to have the stitches removed), but the skin was held in place every few inches with surgical tape to minimize scarring. I was told to leave these in place until they fell off by themselves, which they did over the next few weeks.

After the surgical tape fell off, my sister would rub cocoa-butter salve (not the regular lotion, but the thicker stuff) on my scar, because we had heard it’s good for scar reduction. (She had rubbed it on her stomach when she was pregnant to guard against stretch marks, too.) I wish that I’d taken a picture of my scar back then, but even though I thought about it I never actually went through with asking anyone to photograph it for me.

My friends were great about picking me up from home and entertaining me — I wasn’t allowed to drive for the first few weeks post-surgery. I couldn’t sit comfortably without a pillow behind my lower back (even on a sofa), so I would carry a small pillow around with me wherever I went. (Yes, I even took a pillow with me when I left home and would use it in the car, at other people’s houses, and even in restaurants. I was in too much discomfort otherwise.)

It was still painful to sit up when I had been lying down in bed, so most of the time I would prop myself up with a mountain of pillows. To get out of bed, I would move one of my shoulders up first, then stand up in a wide, rolling motion since I couldn’t just sit straight up. I’m pretty sure that I slept on my back (as opposed to my side, like I do now) for close to a year afterward, since it was more comfortable that way.

The recuperation was tough in the beginning. I couldn’t bend more than six inches forward, and I got tired very easily. I would drag myself outside into the August heat a few times a day to walk in a circle around the apartment parking lot that I was living in at the time. I had prescriptions for various painkillers, but since I hate taking prescription drugs I had mostly weaned myself off of them within a few weeks time.

For the first few months after the surgery, I would get random, starburst-type pains in my right ribcage. I described it as a starburst-pain because it would start in a small area inside my ribs (about the size of a fist), and get increasingly worse — a hot, prickly, tingly pain that radiated out to a much larger area. When I told my surgeon about it during a follow-up visit, he said it was the nerves healing themselves and that it should go away on its own, which it gradually did.

Part 4: Today