I did receive a comment as to who the good looking baby is? Well that is my 7 month old grandson Lucas Gordon Park. Here he is learning how to use a tape measure. You can see from the picture that my nose has returned to normal size. This is post surgey by 2 weeks.

What does it take to heal from brain surgery? Well that is the question. I don’t know the answer but I am learning more every day.

After breakfast the morning after the surgery they start again with the hormones. I was feeling better than expected and doing some walking. Still had the IV shunt but no IV running. They would start it as required for antibiotic use. I required this as long as the trumpets were installed. They would flush the IV line periodically throughout the day. For anyone who knows me this is not my favorite pass time. I don’t like needles. I actually think we should rename hospitals to The needle house.

The doc was in and we discussed how I was feeling. Since he saw my family was visiting he did mention that he had taken the time to straighten my nose out as had been suggested by Alexis. I think this caught her by surprise that I had actually passed on her request to the doc. This made everyone laugh but this time there was no blood spurt from my nose. Guess I left my mouth open when I laughed. He said the packing would be removed today and he would have my nurse and the floor charge nurse do it after supper.

Removal of the nose packing was the next big thing on the agenda. After all you don’t want to go through life looking like a pig. That would happen after supper. It was suggested that I take something for any pain before the packing was removed. Tylenol 3s were selected so they were given a couple of hours before the deed was to be done. The actual event turned out to be a non-event kind of like Y2K. There was not a lot of pain but I will admit when the packing removed there was a lot of warm gushing flow. The trumpets were removed first and they seemed to just drop out. I will admit I had my eyes closed but they showed me they were out before I knew they had done anything. The right side packing did seem to take a little effort to extract and to this day I have had more oozing from this right side. It seems more work was done from this side than the left. Perhaps the doc is left-handed? I will have to ask him that when I next see him. My only thought when the packing was being removed and the gushing flow came - I sure hope the seal holds up there in my brain and the flow slows down because right now I think everything is being emptied out the nose.

It was over quickly and I never saw how much actually was collected in the towels. Nothing made it to the bedclothes and it probably felt like the flow was larger than it really was. They put an ooze catcher below my nose and I was good to go. Before my stay was over I learned how to make these things. You take a two by four ( not the wooden kind ) and tie a gause strip to it that goes around the back of the head and over the ears like the frame of reading glass. I had to show some of the new nurses how to make it. Some of them wanted to use tape. I would have no part of that. There had been enough things glued to my skin over the last few days. All of which had to be removed. Tape is not your friend!

I started too feel relief immediately that the trumpets were removed. My nose started to shrink – yes shrink! I was no my way back to normal.

That night for pain, which I was feeling very little of, I decided to take just normal Tylenol. That might have been a major mistake. I was not feeling any pain from the surgery but by morning the hormones that they were giving me were driving me around the bend. I was very emotional and wanted to cry over nothing that I could define. My skin felt like it was on fire. I had gotten up in the night to put lotion all over my skin in hopes to put the fire out. Perhaps a better way to describe it is crawling skin. I was very uncomfortable. I refused to let them take any blood before breakfast. My skin was on fire and I could no deal with a vampire right now.

The day nurse from yesterday was on again today. I paged her at breakfast and told her of my problems. She was great and said I needed to take Tylenol 3s again – not for physical pain but drug related pain. This is something I did not want to do. They may work for pain but the codeine tends to shut down the digestive tract. This is not a good thing. The butt runs the body. It is more important than the heart, the lungs and the brain because if it fails to function the others soon shutdown. To go home they usually like the Butt to be working.

So back on the drug wagon! My endocrinology (hormones) doc showed up and I told her about the skin crawl. They did prescribe a different hormone that I am on now but I don’t know if this was because of my reaction to the first one or if this was the plan all along.

All I can say is that they sent me home without the butt working so I warn anyone that needs to take Tylenol 3s – beware. And it was not for lack of trying to get things working. I had the nurse that evening give me a laxative and I had been drinking fiber drinks for two days. That first movement was sure a pleasure but it happened at home.

J G