Perplexing

Well I know everyone is waiting. What's happening? How are things progressing? What did the doctor say? Are you "better" or at least getting "better"?

Here's a cliff's notes version. When I saw the doctor on Wednesday he was both happy and perplexed.

Happy Because:

• As far as surgical pain goes, I'm doing well (I always get going on a good stride at the two week mark.) Just have a few little pains, which to both me and him are minor and to be expected.
• My incision has healed very nicely!
• The lump above my stoma that was there before surgery seems to be gone.

Perplexed Because:

• I have no appetite, do not want to eat and am not gaining my weight back. Me not wanting to eat is weird, very weird. I always want to eat even when I don't feel good.
• I'm nauseous all the time no matter what I take for it. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with my meds as I'm only taking pain meds and not even that frequently and I'm taking my low blood pressure meds, which I've been taking for three years.
• I'm having weird spasmy pain when I empty my bladder and also randomly around my stoma area.

I had some blood and urine samples done last weekend and for some reason those came back negative. Side note, every time I've done blood work in the last three years it's come back that I'm fine even when my white blood cells should be off the charts because of infection. Just another quirk of my body.

Because Super Surgeon Dude was so perplexed as to why the above things weren't better, he repeated blood and urine workup. They called yesterday to say that I actually do have bacteria in my urine. Good news to me, because maybe with the antibiotics I started last night I'll feel better soon.

However, although we would all like me to be making huge daily progress, that just isn't the case. I don't notice things day to day, it's when I look back over a few days or really over weeks, that I see progress and so far that progress has been in acute surgical pain. Today was a bad day in the nausea department and I slept a lot. Hopefully once I get more meds in my system the U.TI will get under control and maybe, just maybe the nausea will go away.

It's hard and feels like we are disappointing when we get asked every day if I'm feeling any better. Trust me, nobody wants that more than me. Who wants to feel barfy all the time? I'm trying, I'm really trying. I'm feeling better than I was when we came home from the hospital and in spite of my food/nausea issue my strength is better too. I do always hope tomorrow will be a better day, but I don't expect that things will miraculously go away. Like most everything else, I believe the nausea will slowly fade into the sunset over the next couple of days or weeks.

I know that stinks, and hey maybe I'll be proven wrong. Here's hoping. If not, by mid-week I'll have to call back and have another CT scan done. I really don't want to do that so my goodness please nausea powers that be let me feel better by then.

We are all perplexed and as usual we are at my body's mercy so lets just be patient or try to be anyway. We don't have any other choices, least of all me.