Day 17 (Monday) - Road & Recovery

I expect my posts will become less frequent from here forward.

It's nice knowing that I am over the physically hardest part of my recovery, and that I'll be back to work tomorrow (if only from home). But I will continue to blog about important milestones and thoughts up until week 6, at by which point I should be completely back to my personal normal.

Yesterday was a pretty low key day. The biggest event was making a Costco run with Richard for things we've been needing given today's storm warning for Hurricane Sandy.

I drove for the first time since pre-op days, which felt OK and was better than bracing myself while Richard drove, wonderful as he is. However, for as good as I've been feeling, I learned the hard way that there is a movement I am not yet ready to do: The Twist.

Without thinking twice I did a super full turn and stretch at my waist to see while backing out of our parking space at Costco (a mad house)—you know the posture, one arm around the back of the passenger seat. Owww.

Any incision tenderness left was revived to the fullest.  But hey, the days have been more boring lately without as much pain to fill the time, so it added a little excitement. ;-)

"After a fall such as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling downstairs!"

- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

Day 15 (Saturday)

Being so in tune to my core these past couple of weeks has been quite an eye-opening experience.

It is amazing how much energy and muscle goes into even the simplest actions, like sitting. I'm not going to say I took these things for granted—my abs and back are the body parts I take best care of when I'm healthy because I know a lot depends on a strong core. But I definitely didn't appreciate this to the fullest.

Case in point: Richard and I went out to dinner tonight for the first time since my operation, which was wonderful. But after an hour or so of being in our booth I had to turn to him and say, "I need to leave, I can't sit here anymore." I just couldn't maintain the posture.

Definitely the right decision to wait another week before going back into the office.

Sayonara.

Day 11 (Tues) - Part 2: Anatomy Lesson

Well, I've just spent the past hour re-learning female pelvic anatomy.

My last true reproductive anatomy lesson was probably in 8th grade (mind you, through my Unitarian church's Sunday School About Your Sexuality course--middle school was useless for sex ed).

By Fabiform, Wikimedia Commons: License Info

More specifically, I have been reviewing the precise location of everything surrounding my uterus so I can try to make sense of the pains I still have.

NOTE: There are far more graphic drawings than this out there; I'm trying to keep things as G-rated as possible.

To give you a sense of my ex-fibroid in context of this drawing, imagine a large, round mass drawn in at the middle-backside of the uterus. That's where my fibroid was. And it was even larger than my uterus.

(I hope to get a copy of one of my pre-surgery ultrasounds. Another woman, whose fibroid recovery blog I came across, managed to get one.)

Unfortunately, my anatomy review hasn't been helpful. There's nothing I can find located where I still have pains: very lower right and left, about level with the pubic bone (not shown here), which falls in front of the bladder.

I have to assume these pains are my incisions still healing internally. The area on my right hurts the most, which is also my largest incision, and maybe the spot through which they removed the fibroid, piece by piece. Ick.