79pmooney

Timely bump. I had my second last Thursday. Mesh again, this time other side and femoral. Roughly the same procedure but my, how things have changed! Radically more pleasant. Even fun. No more freezing in that thin 1/2 dress. Oh, yeah, you still wear it but I got a tube of warm air to run under it. The anesthetics are better. Faster out, much cleaner wake-up and feelings after. Whole procedure was near painless. (Zero while I was out.) After the surgery medications wore off, I took three aspirins over the next two nights. Nothing else, not even scotch. I've slept well, other than sleeping "watches" of two hours each. (Under orders to walk around every 2 hours.) Reminds me of sailing offshore. I used to spend 20-30 minutes in bed regularly before falling asleep. Not now. I sleep almost all of my watch!

I did get a scare two nights ago. A lot of bright red discoloring around one of the three tiny incisions. I was concerned enough that I drove across town today to see one of the clinic's nurses. She took one look and said it looked really healthy! Just bruising from inserting those patch tools through the tire casing to insert the boot from the inside. Yes a little hard on the casing at that place! Then I realized the doc was manipulating 8" of tool inside my gut from the outside. Yeah, that muscle wall (casing) might have some objections! Was warned that I will probably watch those colors change a lot and probably spread down. OK. (A very slo-mo hallucination. Will the colors in this trip go dark? Blue? Green?)

Oh, in this bike analogy - three casing holes to 1) inflate the tire - blow up my abdomen with CO2, 2) insert the camera and light for the Garmin on the handlebars and 3) the hole for the tools to apply the boot. After the surgery, the doc was unable to roll me up like an inner tube and couldn't quite squeeze out all the gas. Thankfully it was CO2 which absorbs into the tissue faster than air, just like CO2 inflated tires go flat faster. (I didn't get to see this, but I think the doc lifted the handlebars out of the stem and laid them across my thighs so she could see the Garmin while she worked. Forgot to ask when she came by post-op.)

Edit: COVID, I did this last winter right at the start of COVID. Small and I could tuck my gut back in easily but I mentioned it at my tele-physical and got a referral Went last August to have it seen. Well the doc could barely feel it and wasn't at her cross-town home base so she couldn't MRI me. December it made a real step to bigger. Still manageble. She saw me again. Agreed it wasn't urgent, but it was femoral and could become serious. We agreed doing it outpatient and bypassing the ambulance ride and hospital stay in COVID made sense and she put me down as a priority. Next day "got a cancellation. Next week. Want it?"