A Hostage of Right Brain Disorder

I thought about titling this post “ups and downs”…until I realized that I had already used that one. Labor Day will mark five weeks since the surgery. It feels like maybe two…and that’s pushing it. I get mad at myself when things hurt, even though the doctor told me specifically that this would happen, but today was a pretty bad day. I aggravated the situation by scheduling a very full day yesterday, knowing full well that Paul had a special day for the crew planned for today. I simply couldn’t miss that because the guys have really done a super job while I’ve been out, but I was also really worn out and in pain all afternoon. Ah, well…at least there is the long weekend to recover.

Recover…except that I have three estimates, three T-shirt designs, a series of sign designs and a checklist of things needing to be done for the high school concession stand to do over the weekend. Yes, life truly is back to normal.

Well, sports fans, today has certainly been interesting. I started trying to return to normal…whatever that is. I changed the two-and-a-half week old message on my cell phone to something remotely up to date. I also went out…out, as in: to see a client about a project that we are working on. After that I convinced my somewhat reluctant driver to run me by to meet the president of the Recumbent Bike club and we had lunch. Yes, it was shaping up to be a really great day.

But then it happened.

We got home and Katy left to go run some errand. I sat down at the computer to get some work done when, out of nowhere…

Ah…ahhh.. ahhhhhh …sscccccchhhhhhhiiiiittttttt!!!!!!

Or something like that. Yes, I sneezed. Or cursed…or both.

Now I used to be quite a fan of Harry Callahan movies. You DO remember Dirty Harry don’t you? The big honkin’ 357 magnum revolver,”Go ahead, make my day” Dirty Harry. I often wondered what would happen if he ever failed to hit his target dead square…since he never missed, unless it was on purpose (which proves to you DH fans out there that I am a rabid fan since you will remember the scene where he borrows a fellow cop’s gun to practice…and misses the target on purpose so that he can go back later and retrieve the slug…proving once again that he hits exactly what he aims at)

Today I found out what it felt like for ol’ Harry to miss by about 6 inches. Yes, my left shoulder instantly felt like I had a hole blown through it by Harry’s cannon …instantly …before I even finished my sneeze. The rest of the afternoon was spent curled up in bed sucking my thumb and whimpering. Of course, you realize that I had absolutely no pain medication on board. I’m trying to “get back to normal”, so if I feel ok, I don’t take pain med. Ooooooosh. Talk about bad timing.

Maybe tomorrow will be better.

OK, so it’s been a couple of days since I last updated. Nothing of major cosmic significance has taken place during the last couple of days, so I’ve simply taken it easy and tried to heal up.

It really is interesting how being on pain medication affects your awareness of time. I noticed yesterday that the week that I spent in the hospital is almost entirely wiped out of my personal timeline. Not that I don’t remember the events of the week, on the contrary, I remember a ton of the finer details, but it just seems like a week of time simply ceased to exist.

During my time in the hospital there were a number of specific events that stuck out in my mind. There was Kent Williams, one of the Pastors in our church, who dropped byto visit with me while I was in Pre-op. I distinctly remember Kent, but I don’t remember my mother and my wife Katy who were asked to come back and join Kent just before I went into surgery…pharmacology is a strange and wonderful thing. I remember Marilyn, the charge nurse in ICU who sort of “bent” the rule that I was to only have liquids…by slightly melting some orange sherbet, thereby making it a “liquid”. That sherbet was the first thing that I had eaten in over 24 hours and it was absolutely the most wonderful thing I could imagine. I know that it was cheap, institutional food service sherbet, but nothing you could make with fresh cream and prime ingredients could possibly taste any better. I remember Chas (pronounced Chaz), one of the other ICU nurses, that realized that my pain medication was doing absolutely nothing about my shoulder pain and worked tirelessly to get me something that did work. Then there was Morgan in the COU, the “new hire”, fresh out of nursing school and who really cared about what she was doing and it really showed.

There have been so many thoughts running thru my head that I have sort of avoided doing this update…there simply is too much to write about. So many people have called, dropped by, sent me cards or emails…it’s really overwhelming.

My next task is to try to figure out where to go from here. I really do feel like I’ve been given a new lease on life or dodged a bullet. I’m not sure why the Lord has chosen to be so kind, but it’s a daunting task to try to discern what direction to go off in now. I’ll be posting more later but I need to run along and go meditate on a mountaintop or take a dose of pain medication…whichever.

Yes, this is really me reporting this morning. I do feel like I’ve been hit by a truck (my doctor literally said “you’ve been run over by a train”). The wonders of modern pharmacology have had me mostly free of pain, but there are times when I wonder exactly how the train got into the surgery suite. I’m on the way back…more later.