Back home at one rental and then the next, I settled into a routine of slow walks and rest.
I popped Tylenol every six hours like clockwork, with my alarm waking me for the midnight dose. That kept the pain completely manageable, except when I did stupid things like bend or reach, which was especially hard not to do when moving airbnbs a week after I came home from hospital, despite Hale’s best efforts to keep me from doing anything.
Initially, I was still only able to eat a few bites per feed before feeling stuffed and I was also afraid of a recurrence of nausea from the prolonged ileus. But gradually that diminished and within two weeks I was back to eating decent amounts and starting to add back in more interesting and hard to digest foods. Within five weeks, I was back to eating normally. Each day I gained strength and felt more like myself.
Morning and evening walks around (and around and around) the house and daytime walks along the sidewalks in the neighborhood, with my hiking sticks as insurance against a fall that could split my incision, filled my schedule.
Although I was in a good deal of pain, walking slowly didn’t increase it so I was happy to follow doctor’s orders to walk as much as possible in order to expedite my healing. I was exhausted after each walk and happy to collapse for a couple of hours on the sofa or bed before the next round.
We watched as the internal bruising deepened and darkened and spread with gravity, but the hematomas did eventually start to reduce in size, as did the general abdominal swelling. I had a few more post-op complications, including a UTI and phlebitis, that saw us spend our Christmas afternoon and evening at urgent care, but none of them turned out to be anything major and all gradually resolved.
I wove in calls to people close to us, initially just wanting to talk about the hospital stay. I hadn’t spoken to anyone while in the hospital and hadn’t felt up to texting much at all, so all the details were new to everyone but Hale and me.
I wanted to assure everyone that I was healing and the surgery had been a great success. I suppose I also needed to process what had been a traumatizing experience and didn’t want to rush right on without doing so.
The next round of calls was about the ‘good cancer’ news. Although telling your mom that you definitively have cancer and hearing her reaction reinforces that there is no ‘good cancer.’
I struggled mightily with wanting to reassure people that the prognosis was good, while also wanting to be honest about all the uncertainty and upcoming diagnostic investigations that might or might not change that. How much hope did I give people? How much realism should I convey? How to share the uncertainty that the diagnosis was only preliminary and could be worse without alarming them?
During my first week out, I was stunned to receive an email from Ali, our nurse in Whangarei, just checking in because she’d been thinking about us. The kindness of Kiwis will never cease to amaze us. We wore our pounamu with a new fervor – seeing it as a protector but also a reminder to carry that kindness with us and be like Kiwis rather than descend into the mad rush of rudeness so prevalent in US society today. Another benefit of a life of international travel – bringing back the good things you find in other countries.
And through it all, I struggled to figure out how to wrap my head around our new reality.
