“We need to say ‘I love you’ more,” was what my husband told
me as he lay in the recovery room immediately after having his L5 and S1
vertebrae fused. Or rather,
immediately after having his disc in between his L5 and S1 vertebrae removed
and an artificial cage with scaffolding put in place instead. Spinal fusion is not something that
happens during surgery, but something that occurs during the long, arduous
months that follow surgery, as your body heals as a result of the actions taken
by a surgeon. In the meantime, you
spend a lot of time lying around, being mostly incapacitated and waiting and
hoping for the spine to fuse.
Brian has taken to watching a lot of movies.
But the beginning of post surgery is something that took me
aback—right from the very few seconds that I saw him. I was lucky enough to be allowed in the post surgery
recovery area, and they let me in to see him as early as they allow anyone—and
immediately when I saw him, I could tell the effects of anesthesia were still
with him, and the effects from the morphine they were giving him added to
it. Brian babbled—he talked about
some of the most ridiculous things….’I need to buy new sheets’…’I want to
organize that shelf in my room’…’I’m in pain…it’s a four’ (I had to tell his
nurse to double any estimate of pain he was giving her)…and the one that really
stuck with me: ‘We need to say ‘I love you’ more”…and we do. And that’s mostly
because everybody does—but more because, as men, we tend to have a gender-biased
assumption that “If I told you I love you once, and I haven’t told you otherwise,
then it hasn’t changed.”
Ugh…me…caveman.
I spent a long time debating about whether to tell him about
this, because I’m very certain that he doesn’t remember anything from that time
in the recovery room—I didn’t figure this out until a day later when I was
telling about our friend Jeremy and asking if he’d talked to him since those
text messages in the recovery room.
He had absolutely no recollection of the subject.
The time that follows a spinal fusion is nothing short of a
roller-coaster ride. Brian spent
the first couple of weeks talking in his sleep—I’m not capable of telling you
what he said, because it was completely incomprehensible, aside from a couple
of “What the fuck?” statements. He
had episodes of horrible stabbing pain…he had constant less intense pain. He spent 5 days figuring out how
to get his lower GI tract back to normal, and it turns out prune juice was his
savior. Doctors tend to like
to prescribe things—colace and milk of magnesia didn’t do shit for him. (Pun very much intended)
His care has taken a lot of my time as well—in the first
couple of weeks, he was barely capable of moving around the house, so every meal,
every drink, and some nurse-maid duties such as the male porta-urinal were all
des rigueur. I had to leave for
work for about two and a half weeks after that, and he somehow managed to
survive. I’d made frozen meals for
him from Dream Dinners and we worked out that he was able to place them in our
above stove combo microwave/convection oven. We set everything we could at waist level or above—he is
still not allowed to bend down to pick anything up for any reason. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to
all of our friends that came by during that time—you all saved him.
We saw a glimmer of the road ahead the other night by going
to our friends’ Steve and Colvin’s wedding. Some fun times at a point about 8.5 weeks after
surgery—Brian had to alternate between sitting for a while and standing for a
while the whole time we were there, and he loved being at dinner (and congrats
again Colvin and Steve!) Riding in
a car is still a very limited activity though.
I’m particularly worried about how the next couple of months
go because everybody refers to it as the danger-zone in this healing
process. People tend to feel
better and push too hard. Brian’s
exhibiting some symptoms of wanting to do that, but so far, he’s kept his head
on straight. He’s allowed to
walk in the shallow end of the pool for 20 minutes a few times a week, but
otherwise, his only other exercise is his 1 or 2 twenty-minute walks around our
neighborhood each day. There’s
still no bending, no picking up Max’s pills off the floor if he drops them—no
actual swimming, and no significant riding in a car.
I’m currently sitting on a plane for another work trip,
trying not to feel guilty about the two workouts I missed yesterday while I was
putting the house in order for him to be alone again. My return to triathlon training hasn’t so much been affected
by this as it’s just been a little slow—occasionally, there is just too much to
do in a day, and that’s ok. It’s
entirely possible that this slow readjustment to training has been what’s
keeping me from reinjuring myself—life can work that way sometimes.
