Abominable-plasty

10 days after my abdominoplasty, how has it gone, I hear you ask (I have a vivid imagination) so I will tell you.

Don't read on if you're squeamish.

Well, I arrived for it doing on Thursday 15th at 11.30am and was scheduled to go to theatre at around 3, but because I told them I was latex intolerant (which I had been told I was, but apparently I'm not, anyway.....) they moved me to the end of the queue, so it was around 5.30pm when I went down to theatre. Now, I don't have problems with stuff like this so putting me to sleep was fairly uneventful.

My next conscious thoughts were back in my room around 8 in the evening with a raging thirst and that awful twilight zone where your body is fighting the anaesthetic but failing miserably but by 2.00am I was wide awake and full of water and coffee and chicken salad.

The next day wasn't too bad either - considering - and I did manage to make it to the bathroom instead of having to use a bed pan (there MUST be a better way) to get rid of the gallons of water and coffee I was drinking, but I did have 3 fainting spells which I really don't like. Jonathan came to visit around lunchtime, but I was a bit dopey, and Paul came to visit around dinner time when I was more with it, so he stayed for dinner and we had wine. Why? Because we could! Probably the only time I will ever get to stay in a private hospital so might as well make the most of it.

I got quite tearful about the enormity of the whole thing, and what I had put my body - and bank balance - through, for the sake of vanity.

On the Saturday they kicked me out, so home I went. Obviously I was uncomfortable, but I thought that given the size of the cut - I didn't have just a smiley face 'bikini' cut I had a massive upside down T-shaped one - and how soon after major surgery it was, I didn't feel too awful.

Ha ha.

That was obviously to lull me into a false sense of security. When I had been in hosptial, I had had 2 drains so that this fluid that my body was producing to fill the hole that had been left could drain off. When I left, they removed them. They said my body would reabsorb this fluid. Well I started to swell, which made everything very tender, and swell and swell. And then yesterday morning my stomach burst.

At first it was just sort of oozing out a bit, but I was trying to put a dressing on it and couldn't do it fast enough. In the end I gave up and just stood for an hour and a half in the bathroom and let the blood just pour out onto the floor - it finally dawned on me to stand in the bath, but most of it went all over the floor. This was all at around 7 in the morning. To be fair, after all this blood-like liquid had made the bathroom look like the sight of a rather brutal massacre, the pressure in my stomach had subsided so I was more comfortable. But then it all started to build up again.

So, later in the afternoon, I went back to the hospital and saw a nurse who said it was all perfectly normal. So I asked if my stomach would burst again, and she said 'probably, didn't anyone tell you before?' Err, as it happens, no. So I asked her what would happen if it decded to burst when I was out in public and she just shrugged and said it was a bit inconvenient.

So that's something to look forward to when I start Uni properly next week.

(this is hilarious, its just burst again - must be a morning thing, best go stand in the bathroom)