Recovering from surgery: Day 1

After initially waking up from the anaesthetic at about 1115h, I then dozed for the next two or three hours. I was not in any real pain, just aware of some soreness around my tummy – which was fine if I didn’t move about too much. I lifted up my pyjama top at one point to inspect the ‘damage’, and there were five separate dressings, four in a line across the middle of my abdomen and one on its own in the middle and above the others. In the main ‘line’ of wounds, it was the one second from the left that was the most sore – this, I presumed, was the ‘port’ entry site. I never experienced any soreness from the one at the top or the two outer wounds.

As well as the dressings I also had a saline drip in my left hand and initially, an oxygen mask. The nurses later replaced this with a tube under my nose with two small protruding tubes that send oxygen up your nostrils. These were fine but they made my mouth and throat very dry. I was encouraged to sip water frequently and did so.

At about 3pm, two nurses came and helped me to get out of my gown and into my own pyjamas. I then sat in the chair watching TV and sipping water for several hours. My bariatric nurse came in the afternoon and left some reading material about the post-operative eating plan. I read what I could but felt very sleepy. Fortunately, being a Saturday night, my favourite programme (The X factor!) was on and kept me occupied. During this time, the nurses popped in every so often to check on me, replenish my co-codamol and do more observations but otherwise this was a peaceful and reflective time.

The best way I can describe the pain I experienced is to compare it with the feeling of stomach cramp that sometimes accompanies severe diarrhoea in a hot country! Alternately, what you might get if you’d been down the gym and seriously overdone the sit-ups!

At 9.30pm I got myself washed, teeth cleaned and ready for bed (X Factor lovers fear not, husband was video-taping the results show!). This was no mean feat considering I had to lug the saline drip hanger around with me and continually untangle the extended oxygen tube from various bits of furniture! I called the nurse to help me get into bed which I knew I wouldn’t be able to manage on my own. The nurse attached some wrap-arounds on my lower legs which were attached to a machine. This inflated the material, applying pressure to my calves to reduce the chances of a DVT (deep vein thrombosis). If you’re having difficulty understanding my explanation, think of these wrap-arounds being like large versions of the thing that is wrapped around your arm when you have your blood pressure taken – these are exactly the same except less pressure is applied. I mention these wrap-arounds because I found them really funny. There I was, lying in bed, and every 25 seconds (I know, I counted), one of my legs would be lifted up by a few centimetres. Then 25 seconds later it would go down and the other one would be inflated up – and so on. As I lay there trying to get to sleep, I had a vision of someone filming my legs during the night and then speeding up the replay and thought it would look like something out of a Monty Python sketch ….. Yeah, OK, perhaps I was still ‘high’ on anaesthetic!!

I drifted off to sleep about midnight. A was woken at about 1am, 4am and again at 5.30am for observations and more co-codamol, but otherwise slept well until about 0830h.