Home at last... Warning: Loooong doesn't begin to describe.

Whew...Man, what an experience! Finally, I am home and things will return to something resembling normal (if there really IS such a thing around here...lol). It was so much more than incredible finally getting to wrap my arms around my kiddos and squeeze 'em tight, and hug my husband with a real hug (not from a hospital bed) and not let go for a looong time...

Anyway, figured I would post a bit here about my hectic but sometimes the opposite, frustrating yet sometimes amazing, anger yet other times, inspiration inducing last few days....But a BIG warning to those couple of people who may actually attempt to read any of this babble and few lame attempts at humor, this may get a BIT long winded!

Well...Had to get my ass up at the buttcrack of dawn, or maybe 3:30 am is too early even to be considered the "buttcrack"...(the birds weren't even singin' yet) in order to be at the hospital for a 5:00 am check in time to the pre-op waiting area...Ugh...Soooo NOT a morning person here. More like something scraped off the sidewalk or the bottom of your shoe if expected to function before 6:30 am, but anyway....Lets get it over with!

Got to the waiting area and of course, I was instructed to remove everything but what I was born with and to put on one of them lovely backless (and buttless) numbers that they only give you to wear in hospitals.

Didn't have to wait too long before someone came to wheel me on into the prep area for surgery where I would get to speak with the anesthesiologist, a couple of residents and finally, my surgeon before the surgery. Laid there on the stretcher for a bit while things were just starting up for the day...Snuck a peek at my chart and saw their blurb in my history about how I have had "multiple recurrences of melanoma in my left leg despite repeated surgeries" while I waited for another half an hour...

All things considered, everything moved pretty quickly and smoothly until several attempts to start my IV were made and failed, resulting in 3 blown veins...Finally an IV was started and I was wheeled on in. YIKES...Here we go to no place I had ever dreamed or wanted to visit: The operating room (for the 5th time in my semi-short life).
They gave me some injection into the IV line that was supposed to relax me...somehow I DON'T think so...I was wired. All the staff in the OR upon seeing my wide awake appearance, introduced themselves :).

Onto the table while too many sticky pads for the monitoring equipment were applied to too many areas to count. In comes the anesthesiologist and the surgeon, and I know this is IT. Countdown to BLACKOUT for a few hours.
The last thing I see is my own reflection in the overhanging high-powered light on an arm right above me. My last thought before the mask was applied to my face and the memory stops, no matter how horrible it sounds, was this: Man, this is F**ked up!
But of course, I know that sadly, there are many worse cases...too many. Just wasn't thinking too much about that then.

The procedure took over 8 hours....about passed right back out when I found THAT one out about two whole days later when I was more coherent. Of course, not being a constant state of semi-consciousness, there were periods of something not quite resembling lucidity...Heheh.
Definitely an experience, but ahhh, well, it usually is.

Here are a couple of rambling thoughts I had while I was in a drug induced haze and mostly chained to the hospital bed but finally able to stay conscious for more than five minutes at a time on the third day....


I am bummed...I don't know why or whether or not it seems strange...but I just am...Maybe just the simple fact of being in the hospital does it to me; because it has, in the past...every time...

I was riding semi high this morning most likely because it was the first time I woke up in days and felt something resembling human...And let me tell you, I was far less than stellar or light those first couple of days...
Possesed by demons is more fitting of those early moments. Those first couple of days...MAN....Did I ever feel like dog crap at an estimated 212 degrees. Coming up and out of that days long tunnel of post anesthesia misery seemed to take 100 times that...When I wasn't in a near catatonic yet supposedly awake morphine induced stupor, I was having morphine induced hallucinations and hearing things that weren't there...Oh, and one big MOTHER of all migraines which lasted for 3 DAYS. Three days of hurling my guts up while seeing stars explode across my inner eyelids. Cheery, I was not. It was far from pretty.
This morning (it was MOnday) thank the good Lord above, I felt much, much better...Plus, Ed, being the incredible man he is, was right by my side. But once he made his exit, hearing the hustle and bustle of other visitors bailing out for the night, and an almost utter quiet descending upon the hospital hallways, I felt extremely isolated...and ALONE....

Outside the sirens scream and wail, traffic rolls by and the world keeps spinning at its continous and unrelenting pace, and I sit here in a state of suspended animation...My leg, all seemingly 200lbs. of it, throbs its own continuous pulse...
Now, I re-enter the world of (hopefully) NED status, but with it, comes LIMBO-land. I know I will take limbo-land any day over melanoma-ville, but hey...it still ain't easy...

Down the hall, all is silent until I hear a dam break...a woman's faltering voice, followed by her succumbing to a sob and cry....
Maybe it is the place....


Whoever said melanoma cannot take away our dignity oughta be shot in the head...or at least broadsided upside the back of it with a 2X4 Tom & Jerry style. Okay, maybe I am being a little (or a LOT) too harsh there, since truly and in all reality, we only loose our dignity if we give it away.
Of course, I wasn't thinking that when the 10th nurse, nurse extern, or intern or whatever poked their little skull into my curtain posing as a privacy barrier to ask if I wanted a bed bath/sponge bath, etc, etc. I don't think how dirty I may or may not have been 3 hours post-op was too high on my priority list right about then...Nor do I think it would have had any influence whatsoever at that point on my comfort level. Hah.
But still they persisted just the same.
"Mizz Carlino, I am here to give you your sponge bath." Whaaaat?!?! Helloooo? I could barely roll the hell over at that point....I was still in the post anesthesia care unit.

As it turned out, I had to spend the night there until a bed opened up on the intermediate surgical ICU.

Melanoma can also teach you humility in no small way, along with making further random stabs at your dignity at any given time....

I rise up at a snail's pace the first time I am allowed to leave the bed on the third post-op day, all twisted and bound up, hunched up like a 90 year old replaced my 30 something year old body, hobble over to the lovely facility which in my currently diminished state, I am only allowed to use: THE BEDSIDE COMMODE.

Can you say Fabulous?

Oh, and someone must help you hobble over to this aforementioned COMMODE, thus further sapping more dignity away. Then, being the lucky soul that I am, proceeds to walk out the door without closing it....A few docs walk by, a clump of students, along with some nurses for good measure, and not a one of 'em can resist that all too powerful urge and pull to rubberneck their heads in the direction of the very frightful, semi-young, yet haggard-looking woman on the COMMODE. UGH.

Oh, and it must not be forgotten having to use the call bell in advance to get the assistance in the first place...When the person on the receiving end calls out "Yeah...can I help you?" over your speaker, you know you are in trouble. You know now, at this point in time, you will have to find a way to express over your speaker (instead of the only marginally more dignified method of face to face) that you need to use the throne, hopper, or just to rattle their cages (Why the heck not?), "I gotta go poop."

Then there are the countless others who come in asking if you have passed gas yet. Heheh. They're coming to take me away, hahahahah!
Okaaay. I must stop for now before the whinese police put me in lockdown. (I was on a Starbucks high and knew I needed to unwind when I wrote this, not that there is any excuse.)

On to bigger but not necessarily better things....Dilaudid...Not sure if I spelled it right, but DAMN!!...Don't think I need to worry about it anyway, as I won't be putting too many requests in any time soon for that particular pain medication.

The couple of times the nurse brought in the syringe during the daytime while I was wide awake, was sweet relief.
Knocked my pain down from a 7 or 8 to a 3 or 4 on a scale of 1-10. Awesome.
Didn't give me nausea. Even better.
The last dose even gave me a little buzz. COoool. Now we're talkin. (Bad, I know...harhar.) That should have been the first clue...
Went to go to sleep and HOLY HELL, what kind of ACID in wonderland trip am I on?!?!?
I was visited upon by the worst kind of nightmares I have ever experienced. I would jerk myself awake, soaked in sweat, terrified, look around, feel like I was really bugged out of my head for 10 more minutes, then tell myself "Holy SHIT...that was bad...roll over so you don't slip back into that dream from hell again!"

I even freaked out the night nurse...She set the alarm on my bed in case I got up during the night in a disoriented state and fell...

But inevitably, my eyelids, feeling as though each one was weighted down by its own 10lb weight, would slip closed once again. Back to psychedelia, acid trip from hell, like it or not. I definitely think, in this case...NOT!
Even morphine didn't bring on this vast array of total wig out potential type nightmares.
It's a toss up, I guess.
Live with a little more pain and a lot fewer psychotic nightmares by avoiding narcotic or opiate type pain medications, or....

Take the Dilaudid paved road to insanity-ville for a few hours. Awww, hell...Maybe I am assuming too much and it really wasn't the Dilaudid that night (Monday).
It could have been that gray, unappetizing piece of turkey bathed in its same-colored gelatinous gravy posing for dinner that night that did the trick.

Either way, I will avoid Dilaudid at all costs.....and maybe that turkey too...Just to be safe.


Ahh, well...now that this whole experience is behind me and my period of recovery and recollection is upon me, I realize that there were times I could have been on MUCH better behavior. I was at my utmost worst yet...(Profuse apolgies must be doled out to the staff who had to deal with me those first very hairy hours!)...

But as with everything else, it was a bump, albeit a big one, in the road that will now be a part of the landscape behind me. I came back to myself relatively easy with a renewed will to fight...and fight I will.
Plus, I got me some Percocets, and I'm not afraid to use 'em.

It will be my unrelenting MISSION in life to walk down the rest of that hopefully long road with Ed, raising and loving our kids together...and loving each other in the face of all that is pretty...or sometimes, as in this particular case, not.