I’ve never been on pain killers. Ever. I’ve only heard stories of what it is like to be on them. I hear stories about people becoming addicted to pain killers and it ruins their lives. No offense to anyone who has been or is addicted to them but I don’t see why anyone would want to depend on this shit. Not only am I lightheaded and dizzy all the time (thank God I haven’t thrown up) but my brain is mush and all I want to do is sleep. All.The.Time. Now for someone that likes to go go go all the time, read, write and exercise my brain and my body, I don’t like this feeling at all. Don’t get me wrong, I love to sleep (even though as a personal trainer, a lot of sleep does not exist for me) but to wake up at 7 am, have my father inject me with my Lovenox…

(God bless my father for doing that every 12 hours)

…eat breakfast, take my Valium, Oxycodone and Tylenol and immediately feel woozy and want to go back to bed is extremely frustrating. I will sleep for about 1-2 hours, wake up feeling woozy, text some of my friends so I have some social (ish) interactions and then close my eyes and fall back asleep. Oh and I eat somewhere in there to but nothing is very appealing. My night eating apparently hasn’t subsided…I had pizza at 2 am thanks to my father. It was heaven.

So in anticipation of entertaining myself and being the total nerd that I am, I brought a bunch of books by my favorite author Jodi Picoult with me to Vermont thinking, “Hey, I will have a week of laying on my ass doing nothing so I will be a reading machine!” I also brought a lot of yarn so that I could crochet some hats for my clients as their Christmas presents. Yes, if you are a client of mine reading this, that is your Christmas present. But at the rate my mind is going right now, you might not get it until next year. That’s the thing, crocheting takes no brain power but for some reason the thought of crocheting is exhausting. Writing this post is exhausting. Over stimulating even. My mom is making a bunch of noise in the kitchen and all I want is piece and quiet. It’s like my brain is over loaded. The only reason I like my pain killers is because they take me to dream land where I can rest my body and my mind, which as we all know by now, rarely happens. This is the first time in my life I can say that as a conscious human being my mind is NOT running a mile a minute, which is a nice break but it is definitely causing me anxiety. And because of this, I don’t like being awake on my pain killers, I don’t like it at all.

I’m constantly thirsty and I can’t seem to get enough water which means I am peeing all the time and let me tell you going to the bathroom is not fun. The first time I actually went pee was right when I got back from the hospital. The recovery room nurse said that I probably wouldn’t pee until the morning. WRONG….and oh my goodness it was so ******* painful to sit down on that little toilet. Anytime I sit down or get up my hip screams at me which is also why I hate going to the bathroom. My mom had to help me and trust me, as a 27.5 year old, the last thing I want my mom helping me with is peeing…well I guess the other option would be worse….anyways, it has gotten easier but having thigh high compression socks and a constant ice pack on my leg makes peeing not an easy feat. Although that constant ice pack is a savior…

Ice cold water…ahhhhh. It’s almost better than the pain killers.

Those socks go all the way up to my pelvis to keep the blood flowing and prevent swelling and blood clotting. I almost like them because they seem to be squeezing allllll the fat out that I managed to put on my legs through holiday indulgence 🙂

So I am on day 3 of recovery and I can manage to lift my own leg without excruciating pain! (Even though within seconds it aches quite badly) Up until today my parents had to lift my leg onto and off of the couch for me. When I use my crutches I can actually swing my leg a little bit without pain which is a first. The intervals between drug taking is spacing out – instead of every 4 hours its more around every 6-7. I feel a little less helpless than I did the last two days. And I managed to change out of my red polka dot pajamas and actually put contacts in. And since today is the UVM Carnival I decided to represent by wearing my Catamount Athletics sweat pants!

And for some reason on the front page of the Stowe Reporter they used this picture to advertise the UVM Carnival…

Yeah that was me freshman year!!!! After I saw that I just had to put on my sweats to represent! I wish I could have gone to cheer them on so my father did it for me.

All in all I am looking at the positives, ya know the little things matter: picking up my own leg, going up and down stairs faster every day, going to the bathroom alone, not being in excruciating pain, being able to put a little bit of weight on my leg, not watching the clock to see when I can take my pain killers since the pain has subsided a bit. Knowing that in a week I will start PT gets me excited and knowing that tomorrow I can shower for the first time since my surgery…which mind you was Tuesday.

Every now and then I get little bouts of anxiety and I get extremely frustrated and irritable and want to scream at the top of my lungs but I take a few deep breaths and it goes away temporarily. This is the first time in my life I have not been able to do the things I want to do and do them quickly. I am learning patience. Lots and lots of patience. This surgery, like I said in an earlier post, was the climax to many of my lifestyle changes, it was an eye opener and in a way I fear what my life will be like after, will I continue to be positive, to live my life with passion and with no fear? Because I will admit at times I used this as an excuse. But then I think, was it really an excuse? And if it was an excuse, what on earth was it an excuse for? It was an excuse for nothing except toning down my workout routines and relaxing a little bit more in life.

I changed my attitude and became more positive about life because I wanted to. It had nothing to do with my surgery. I know that all of the positive things I have learned, all of the strength I have gained in myself and my choices in life will continue as I go through rehab and as I return to full activity. Of course the positivity and strength will not change because it is who I am, it is a part of me and my character. Just because this surgery finally happened, doesn’t mean I will change my outlook on life. Yes I will get frustrated at times, but that is part of life. It is how I will overcome that frustration that it is important…just like the frustration I am overcoming now.

Like writing this post…It is frustrating because I cannot seem to find the words that I want to say or in the manner I want to say them. In my posts I strive for perfection, for those words that fit perfectly together, that blend so much that reading it is simply easy, that there is a flow, that it is fun to read. I don’t feel that fun when I am writing this post or the post two days ago, so I almost decided to not blog at all this week because these meds are causing this mental block and I don’t like it one bit. I haven’t written in my journal yet which is unlike me in a case such as this. I keep missing the right keys and have to back space more than I care to admit. But just like I am overcoming this surgery, I am forcing myself to overcome this “writers block” that I feel I have. So I write this post and will write again tomorrow even if it is hard and frustrating because I want to continue to challenge my mind as much as I am continuing to challenge my body…slowly challenge my body that is.

So it is my hope that this post makes some sense. 🙂