Recovering

Hey everybody. Daniel here.

Kirsten is thoroughly drugged up and recovering at Beaumont right now. I just dropped the girls off at their respective centers of care and learning and will head to the hospital soon after getting this update out. She'll be discharged today and move back to her sister's for a few weeks where she'll be cared for by her mom, just like she did after her mastectomy. 

Yesterday was a long day. There's something about hospital appointments that begin before dawn that always make me feel like I'm going before a firing squad. Kirsten was more anxious about this surgery than the first. I think because the pain and length of recovery that time were shocking. 

The operation went a bit longer than expected but her doctor told me afterward that he was happy with the outcome. They brought me in to see her after she had woken up enough to make conversation. She told me it was good to see my face and was able to tell me places on her body that she needed me to itch for her. This was a marked difference from last year's surgery, after which she couldn't make eye contact and had the kind of traumatized facial expression of someone who had just been mauled by a bear.

By the afternoon I was forcing her to eat a graham cracker (per nurse's order) and her mouth was so dry she complained that it was like eating a bag of sand. It was funny because she was croaking everything she said and I had a vision of an alternate-reality Kirsten who had never given up smoking a decade ago. I told her she sounded like Marge Simpson and she said "at least I don't sound like Patty and Selma." After thinking about it for a second I said, "Actually, no, you sound more like Patty and Selma." She made a disappointed face. 

By the evening we were watching game shows on the hospital TV and she was sky high on pain meds. But not so high that she couldn't blurt out answers to Jeopardy. One of the questions she got right was some geometry riddle about 180 degrees and triangles or something. I told her it was the hottest thing she'd ever said. I've always found her math nerd side sexy.

So that's about it. She's okay. There were no complications, thankfully. One last dreaded piece to this puzzle is behind us and now she can focus on healing from this procedure and trying to get more of her strength and normalcy back. 

But we're not popping champagne yet. For one thing, as everybody knows, there's no finish line to cross with cancer. It's beaten until it isn't again. And this treatment plan is not even over. She still has more infusions to go (and, when those are done, another procedure to remove her port) plus the nagging side effects of forced menopause – one of which is the inability to ever sleep through the night. Not to whine on her behalf but think about this: since beginning treatment over a year ago, Kirsten has felt some degree of sickness and/or pain every single day. She's never had a day where she felt good or even normal in all that time. She's just fluctuated between feeling bad and feeling terrible. That's her spectrum. Every single day with no days off. Can you imagine that? I get, like, existentially depressed if I've had the flu for more than three days.

So please keep supporting her. She needs it even when she can't bring herself to ask for it.