Picking a house to stay in from afar, when you’re hoping to quickly recover in tranquility from surgery, yet with easy access to groceries, restaurants, etc., is no easy task. Callie certainly seems down our current living arrangements and has settled in quite nicely. She’s not been as much of a fan of staying in the bathroom at night to prevent her from walking all over Annie’s stitches at 3am, but she’s getting used to it.
Annie too is settling into the warm New Orleans humidity enveloping us like a thick blanket, and enjoying the time spent outside in the back yard. Feet up (doctor’s orders!), and her iPad on her lap. There’s a developing Charles Wysocki 1000 piece puzzle on the coffee table just outside the bedroom, so she has easy access to hours of unending frustration, er…entertainment.
Not everything is peacefulness and easy, to be sure. The sutures, particularly around her abdomen, still require solid drug dosing to keep the pain under control, and she’s walking around hunched over given the tightness in that area. She joked earlier about practicing for when she’s 80. Moreover, three times daily she sits patiently on the the toilet while I gently grasp (lesson learned from that first day) on the tubing leaving four incision drain sites and tug on it, pulling two fingers down its length to clear the tubing into the drain bulb. These bulbs are emptied into measuring cups, the amount noted and logged, and the bloody mixture poured down the drain. In an earlier post she talked about how she couldn’t imagine having four drains. Well, here we are. And we have pictures. But not today. Today you get a cat. And you’re probably grateful.
Annie’s post-op appointment is Wednesday, and she’ll probably get the two drains from either side of her breasts out then. The abdomen ones will stay in for at least another couple of weeks, as the volume drained steadily lessens. Everyone will be grateful for the day they come out. In the meantime, from a pain perspective, some days are better than others. But overall we’re moving in the right direction—toward recovery.
The house is quiet this morning, aside from the continual humming of the air conditioner. It’s just right. Annie’s getting what she needs, the cat spends most of its time asleep, and there’s a coffee maker for me. Whew.