Recovery

Recovery from abdominal surgery is no joke! This has made vaginal childbirth look easy as pie, except for the few weeks of having to sit on a pillow and carrying around my two best friends, Tux and perrie bottle. Other than that birthing Tanner was pretty easy and the recovery time was not bad (having intimates with the hubby suffered a bit, but baby making was the last thing on my mind anyway, hehe)! Having my TAC was much harder than I had anticipated. I prepared so much for this surgery. I ran 3-4 miles every.single.day up until two days of leaving to Chicago. I was in great physical shape and my doctor said because of my fitness level I should be healed totally in about a week. WRONG! Apparently I don't heal well. I had a horrible reaction to the morphine pump and strained my incision from all my puking. Then, I don't make a very good "junky" because Percocet pretty much kills me. So Ibuprofen every 3 hours is the only form of drugs that don't make me totally loopy, but also don't totally kill the pain either. I am having really bad sharp pains on the left side of my incision, but have been told it is completely normal. For being in pretty good shape, I can't walk very far without having to stop, not because I'm winded, but because my insides feel like they are about to protrude through my stomach.

Today, the incision feels a bit better, but now that some of the swelling in my belly has gone down, I am feeling the bruising type sensation the doctor warned me about. I am so thankful not to look five months pregnant anymore, but I still have some swelling in the tummy area which brings out the crazy, body image self diagnosed body dismorphic disorder in me! I am critical on myself on a good day, so having this extra whatever it is around my belly is pretty much killing me. Not being able to run or workout is freaking me out as well. I miss running. I hate it while I'm doing it, but when I can't that's the only thing I want to do! Everyone keeps telling me that I "just had surgery" and that I need to take time to recover, but I just want to feel normal again and do normal, active things with Tanner. I am so thankful for Hot Yoga that starts next month with my good friend Brittney! Hopefully that will help with the toning back up of my hacked through ab muscles!

This whole experience has made me quite terrified of my future pregnancies that all will require c-sections. I thought I would want to try for baby # 2 right away, but I'm rethinking that. Maybe by late fall when this memory starts to fade, but nine months of anticipating this pain again is not going to be fun. The things we do for our children. I will be sure to remind future kiddos about the crap I went through to make sure they made it into the world as safely as possible!

That's my whine and rant for the day. I'm sure I will feel better soon and look back on this whole experience and smile, knowing that this pain and discomfort is only temporary and will only lead to good things in the future!