I’m two days home from spending five hours in the hospital. Everything went well, except for my reaction to the narcotics. My body’s shifting into healing mode, which means I’m about to fall asleep again, but before I do, I thought I’d share some details. It’s a little odd to know so many people are following along at home, but I’ve invited it, so I won’t slam doors shut now.

These are just odds and ends from the planning meeting with the oncologist who did the surgery through the surgery and recovery.

• Apparently I nod in all the right places. Both the oncologist and the pre-op nurse asked me if I was in medicine. I blame a large vocabulary, Google and PalMD.
• No religion is never the default. Someone from Abbott Northwestern Hospital called me in advance to confirm that their information on me was current. “And we show ‘Lutheran’ for religion. Correct?” Uh, no. Not a bad guess in Minnesota, but completely wrong.
• People really think spouses should be there for everything. Twice my husband came to me and said people were telling him he should be there with me when I checked in at 5:30 a.m. Twice I told him that I’d much rather have him be awake and functional when I woke up after the surgery.
• I still can’t fall asleep on my back, as much as I wanted to nap during pre-op. 5:30?
• Being in the hospital during a Joint Commission audit results in lots of repeated questions and lots of apologies for the repetition.
• Writing on the lower abdomen is “close enough” for marking that surgery is supposed to be done on the cervix.
• After about half a bag of IV, you don’t really care that you couldn’t drink anything that morning.
• Heated hospital gowns are the best idea ever. Air chamber in the gown + hot air blower hookup = awesome.
• Operating rooms without functioning thermostats are a much worse idea, but having heated blankets piled on top of you almost makes up for that.
• I’m much less disturbed by being strapped in and having my arms taped down than I am by the idea of falling off the narrow operating table.
• It is much more comfortable to undergo a conization under general anesthesia, the brain-wave monitor is going to feel like velcro being pressed into my forehead, the oxygen mask smells like plastic, and I had the most informative nurse anesthetist ever.
• Anesthesiologists (or at least this one) like propranolol. “She’ll have a nice, slow heartbeat.”
• The most uncomfortable pre-op moment was having the oxygen sensor put on. If I’d known, I’d have trimmed that fingernail.
• I still don’t know what kind of anesthesia I had. One of my Facebook friends suggested I ask for propofol (“Michael Jackson gave it a bad name.”). However the nurse anesthetist said there was a shortage of it (“You know. The stuff Michael Jackson was taking.”), so I’d get gas. However, once I was in the OR, the anesthesiologist said they were knocking me out through the IV. So, yeah, no clue.
• The most painful post-op moment was getting rid of the monitoring pads. At least this time, unlike when I got my appendix out, only one of the five is still outlined on my skin in dark red.
• Despite having had a very short night of sleep before the surgery (5:30?), I fought the anesthetic pretty hard once I grasped a tiny bit of consciousness.
• Fentanyl is lovely stuff. At least immediately.
• Some people apparently think it’s weird to Tweet soon after an operation. This does not mean they don’t want the news right away. I might have had deeper thoughts on that, but I was under the influence of fentanyl.
• I’m not cut out to be an addict. Either the fentanyl or the Vicodin I had as a follow-up caused nausea, poor temperature regulation, and a truly nasty headache. No more for me, thanks.
• Tweeting snippets of dialog from the new Ratchet and Clank game will cause some people to assume you’re having a great time on those narcotics.
• Coming home to a heap of well-wishes is such a lovely thing that it requires its own blog post.
• I’m waiting for the pathology reports that will tell me how often I need to have Pap smears for the foreseeable future. I’ve already been told that I’ll never be able to stop having them.
• I’ve also been told that I need to take good care of my immune system, mostly in ways I already do. “Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Modern science can’t quite tell us why those are important yet, but we know they are. Avoid a lot of red meat. Don’t be one of those people who only sleep four hours a night. Do something three to four times a week that you find stress-reducing.” I’d already concluded I needed to find a better way to manage the amount of stress in my life, but I’m still debating what kind of changes will actually do that instead of creating someone else’s perfect stress-free life that I’ll hate and be stressed by.

And now to nap.

There’s a Facebook meme running around that’s basically, “Describe me in one word.” I put that up recently, and someone answered, “resilient”. While I’m sure it wasn’t his intent, I almost cried.

Resilience was a fairly new field of study when I was getting my degree in psychology, lo, those many years ago, and I was fascinated by it. I would be, of course. It’s the study of how people recover from bad events instead of being irreparably broken by them. At the time, much of the focus was on how some kids from less than ideal backgrounds grow up to be happy and successful. Hence, my fascination.

In case you’re curious, two of the big things that allow kids to survive and thrive whatever their circumstances are problem-solving skills and the presence of even a single adult who is thoroughly in the kid’s court. This plays no small part in my opinions on education and informs my interactions with the few kids in my life. It also limits the number of children I do interact with. But I digress.

In the end, resilience mostly comes down to resources–having them and knowing how and when to use them. I got myself into a bit of trouble this spring by gambling that I had the resources to support me in taking an emotional risk. For various reasons, some of those resources weren’t available to me when things went badly. Between that and the fact that I’d declared some solutions to my problems to be off limits, I boxed myself in. Badly.

I got hurt. Not sleeping for more than a couple hours at a time, running on adrenaline, back against the wall because that’s one direction they can’t come at you from–that kind of hurt. Unsurprisingly, I made myself sick. Slightly more surprisingly, I stayed sick.

Actually, I’d already been sick. Too much time off in the last couple of years for sleeping away the muzzy head and sore throat. Too much time off for migraines. Just a day here and a day there, but enough to eat up all my time off so I didn’t get vacation aside from the occasional long weekend. And after I hurt myself, it was worse.

Being, indeed, at least somewhat resilient, I decided this was a problem that needed fixing and went to the doctor. There’s nothing really wrong with me. Well, I have allergies that are now responding decently to a new antihistamine. The joints in my big toes are screwed up in ways that can probably be compensated for without intrusive intervention, like my knees. I still have a wonky heart valve, but it’s not noticeably worse than it was seven years ago. But all my blood tests are well within normal ranges, and I’m not showing any inflammatory markers that would suggest I picked up the family problems.

Oh, and there’s the problem of the bad Pap smear. And the waiting for the biopsy results. And the figuring out what kind of surgery I’ll be having. All just a little stressful.

So changing my antihistamine hasn’t made me any better. In fact, I’ve been worse. I’ve slept twelve hours in a night before, but never while averaging nine to ten hours of sleep regularly, and I’ve still had trouble keeping my eyes open while “awake.” Not content to let my throat have all the fun, my ears have been hurting too, all without a fever or elevated white cell count. I went on leave from work to formalize the fact that they can’t count on me to be there on any given day. The drugs that are supposed to help keep me from getting migraines haven’t been helping, or at least I’m still getting migraines.

In other words, it’s not been good around here.

That’s what “resilient” was dropped into the middle of, and why I almost cried. I haven’t been feeling my most resilient lately, despite this person nailing one of the ways I usually think of myself.

At the same time, I realized that I am being more resilient than I’m giving myself credit for. Maybe my body isn’t bouncing back, but I am still working on my problems, even if I don’t know how the answers will turn out. We changed my migraine medication to propranolol, which has worked for me before. It may also give my body a rest from some of the stress by blocking the action of adrenaline.

I’m grabbing glimpses of fun where I can find them, saving the energy I do have for a friend’s birthday dinner, another’s baby shower. I’m fighting the work ethic that says that if I can’t do the things I normally do that require concentration, I shouldn’t be doing anything else either. I’m losing the war on feeling guilty about it, but I’m trying.

I’m not ruling out any solutions this time around. Some of them aren’t very appealing, but they’re staying on the table while I think about what they offer and what they demand. In the end, that may be this summer’s big lesson. This is where my limits lie.

Continuing in the tradition of providing too much information that I set with my last post at Quiche Moraine, since the people who commented found it either informative or inspiring, here’s the update on my situation. According to the biopsies taken last Wednesday, I don’t have invasive cervical cancer. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that this still isn’t easily fixed. I’m in for more “helpful violence” that’s going to be painful and require some recovery. Here’s the problem, with illustrations.

The most common method for treating what I’ve got is a conization, or cone biopsy. (That’s right, I’m not done with biopsies yet.) This is a procedure in which a cone of tissue is taken out of the center of the cervix. In this illustration, a scalpel is used to cut on the dotted lines.

The problem is that conization won’t remove all the tissue I need removed. The lesion I have is large enough that one side of it stretches outside the area that would be removed. Quite far outside, in fact, to around where the blue arrows point. Nor is this the least problematic of the tissue to be removed. It’s still classified as CIN 2–3. Those cells need to die before they become cancerous.

The next step is to meet with an oncologist to decide whether this can safely be done in a less-invasive manner, probably with lasers in addition to the conization or whether I’ll need to lose enough of the cervix that I’ll have to have a hysterectomy. The discussion, of course, will be complicated by my tolerance for this sort of risk–and what my insurance company is willing to pay for. Yes, they have a certain say in this as well.

So that’s pretty much it for the information I added today. It’s all good news, really, given the restrictions I knew about after the biopsy. Since I dragged my readers into the waiting with me, I’m happy to answer nosy questions in the comments as well.

Something happened today that was cool enough to share. It happened at work, so the details will be almost nonexistent, but I think the idea will come through.

We have periodic office-wide meetings in which we talk about the various things different parts of the company are doing for our clients. They’re about being able to cross-sell and about staying engaged in the business and the office despite being so busy we can go weeks without seeing even the people in our own line of business.

Given that, it wasn’t too surprising when an email came out saying we’d be doing something at the next meeting that would require some action on our part. In order to demonstrate the efficacy of a targeted communication strategy, we would take a little survey about where we stood on an issue. The survey would sort us into groups, and we’d put our group name on a tag when we got to the meeting and sit with others in our group while we learned about the strategy.

It felt like one of those games you play at a party where no one really knows anybody else, but whatever. I know not everybody is as weird about manufactured group cohesion as I am. I took the survey.

Then I looked at the questions that were being asked. Then I looked at the category it put me in (“there are no bad categories,” said the email). Then there was this little roaring in my ears. I didn’t disagree with the category, but what it said about where I stand was no one’s business but my own. No, I thought, you can’t make me reveal that.

I knew there was another person in the office who was going to end up in the same category and was going to be just as reluctant to talk about it. I could have gone to them and commiserated. It was tempting. A steam valve would have been useful. But this person wasn’t in a position to fix this any more than I was.

Instead, I wrote back to the person who sent the email. I didn’t tell them I was upset personally. That wasn’t any of their business either. I didn’t say, “You can’t do that.” It was true, but it wasn’t specific enough to point to the outcome I wanted.

Finally, I settled on, “What are you doing to protect the privacy of those people who don’t want to reveal information on this issue to their coworkers?”

The answer came back, rather quickly, “Oh, thank you. I wasn’t thinking about that, but I see how people could be concerned. I’ll make sure everyone knows they can opt out when I send out the reminder.”

Bingo.

Then I talked to the other person I knew would be upset at the idea of sharing and told them the second email would be coming. This person told me how they’d gone back into the survey and lied to see what other group they might end up in–and thanked me three or four times for doing something about it. Made me pretty happy for the rest of the day.

Turns out, sometimes all you need to do is know how to ask.