Recovery is different for everyone, and I had heard a pretty wide variety of stories. One friend said he mowed the lawn the next day, others said they couldn’t get out of bed for 2 weeks. Most were somewhere in between.
For me the challenge was dizziness. SO. MUCH. DIZZINESS! Sure there was quite a bit of pain the first few days, but there were prescriptions for that. As long as I kept up on them it was bearable. First thing in the morning was awful. But the dizziness…
I talked to a lot of people on Facebook and I am definitely the exception. Most didn’t have issues after a couple of days, but I was dizzy every time I moved for 2 weeks. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that first time I managed to walk the ten steps from my chair to the bathroom by myself. It was like I had just climbed a mountain!
Every Monday morning I have a bunch of meetings for work. We’ve been doing them remotely anyway (thanks coronavirus). The first Monday was day 4, should be plenty of time for a video call, right? Well, it wasn’t… I did my best, but mostly I just struggled to stay upright because I was so dizzy. After about an hour I was dozing off, pretending as hard as I could to pay attention, but I wasn’t fooling anyone. We signed off the meeting and I promptly went to sleep.
After surgery we took the left arm off of my glasses. The first couple days it was because of the bandage, but even with that off there were stitches and swelling and such. About a week post op I went in and had the stitches removed, everything was looking good (other than the dizziness, did I mention that?). I put the arm back on my glasses, and part of me wondered if that was what was making me so dizzy, because they had been crooked whenever I put them on for a week. But it didn’t help.
The dizziness didn’t change, but it hurt to have them on my ear. Then I ran out of the medication and it was even worse. This one spot behind my ear, right above the arm, was just intense pain!
All in all, it was about 2 weeks before I was feeling good enough to move around and get back to a somewhat normal routine. At this point I have to mention how extremely fortunate I am. My job is very flexible so it wasn’t a big deal that I couldn’t be in the office. On top of that, the people I work with are really incredible, and took care of most of the stuff for me. Plus, my surgery was Dec 10th, so Christmas came right on the heels of recovery and I had plenty of time to get better.
Also, my family is so amazing. Aprille put up with helping me walk to the bathroom all the time and bringing me drinks and whatever else. She was really great. Even the kids were super helpful!
Now it’s on to the next challenge: activation!
