one week post-op

it's been a long week, but finally today i went back to work. a half-day, but still. it felt good to be back in the real world, though i'm definitely not back to normal yet.

a quick recap of my days post-surgery:
- the gas pains and overall exhaustion and discomfort lasted until friday.
- i watched a whole heckuva lot of tv and movies and was waited on hand and foot by my mom and hubby. that part was ok.
- friday morning i thought i was ok to take the dog for a walk. a half-block later i realized i was wrong.
- my mom left friday afternoon.
- by the weekend i had developed some serious cramps. i'm guessing this was more from the d&c than the surgery. they basically felt like period cramps, but instead of being isolated in one spot or another it was my whole uterus contracting all at once. not fun. i also started spotting more than i had the first couple of days.
- then i got a cold. suh-weet. i figured if i was going to be home doing nothing anyway, it wasn't a bad time to get sick.
- saturday i went out for coffee with a friend, walked a total of about 10 blocks round trip, and it wrecked me for the rest of the day. so sad. i didn't do anything else. back to the couch.
- sunday i took a couple of short walks, which felt ok. i just needed to be back on the couch for awhile afterwards to recover.
- i walk really slow.
- i am SO SICK of my living room and my couch.
- monday i decided to stay home from school because of both my cold and the fact that i still wasn't able to get around very well. i will still spotting, most noticeably when i moved around a lot. i knew my hour-long subway commute was likely more than i could handle. but i worked from home most of the day, took another nice walk to the store, and did some laundry. which felt ok at the time.
- mostly i felt normal, except for my belly button. that incision seems to be the most sensitive, which makes total sense. bending over is still very uncomfortable.

that brings us to today. i had my first post-op appointment at the fertility institute, to check my incisions out and make sure that everything looks ok, at 10 this morning. so i slept in a bit and then planned to go to the appointment and then to school. when i got out of the shower, i saw that there was blood all around my belly button.

uh oh.

sure enough, the incision in my belly button was bleeding. i figured this wasn't a great thing. i took my sweet time getting to the hospital for my appointment (i still walk really slow), and when the nurse took a look at it her reaction was the same as mine. "oh!" she immediately left the room and brought back a doctor to check it out.

but the doctor didn't seem alarmed. she poked around in there with a q-tip and drew out some fresh blood. not a ton, though. she cleaned it out with betadine and said that some of the dermabond is coming off and that's why it's bloody. she said it shouldn't be coming off yet and warned me about picking at it (i haven't been) or getting it too wet (i MAY take excessive showers. sigh). but she slapped some gauze on it and said it should be fine, so i'm taking her word for it.

i went to work and did a pretty decent job with a half day of school. my principal sent me home before our after-school meeting, so that helped matters. i'm a bit sore in the middle but the spotting has really decreased. my belly button seems to have stopped bleeding after this morning, but i'm nervous about what will happen when i shower tomorrow. i guess i will try not to get it too wet. i cannot underestimate how GROSS it looks now. it was gross before, but now... blech.

i plan to work the rest of the week, assuming i continue to feel a little better each day. and of course if the bleeding doesn't stop i will give the office a call and see what they think. but it doesn't seem to be anything to worry about. a week from today the hubby and i go for our big follow-up with the doc... can't wait!