Hey everyone! Man it feels like forever since I've written a post and looking at my post history there sure haven't been many but at the same time I have also had to be in the hospital a surprising long time now. Surprisingly long even with the surgery in mind that I had on Tuesday. Starting off, the surgery went well, it's called a laparoscopic cholecystectomy where they generally do 4 small incisions on your stomach to remove the gallbladder so it'll stop infecting my pancreas and other organs around it. The thing was that the MRI here at this hospital showed I had gallstones also stuck in the bile duct which would explain the jaundice (yellowness of skin and eyes) but a few days later when we did another MRI at another nearby hospital they didn't find any there, to make sure that they had actually moved on from it they decided to check the bile duct during the surgery as well and since they were already in the area they decided to also check the liver. I'm not sure and haven't asked but that could explain why there are 5 incisions instead of the usual 4.
One of the bigger incisions is on the belly button which is usually covered well for most people so you won't see the scars as well as the others and that's where they pull the gallbladder out of after having cut it. You're welcome for that imagery. :P
I was given anesthesia and was looking forward to the usual "count down from 10 if you can" but to be honest I don't even remember when it started which I find weird, I do remember having some nice dreams though and then waking up to everything being blurry and someone talking to me. Apparently I was also given morphine before I woke up so I was being all weird, as I was asking the nurse next to be how it went I remember having problems breathing, it felt like if I exhaled too much I felt pain and if I inhaled too much I felt pain so I was trying to describe to her that I could only breathe between 40 to 70% and I'm not sure she got what I meant or if it made any sense. The funny part was when I asked how it went and asked her to hold my hand while she was telling me, lol, I think I remember she did for a while but probably realized I was under morphine and hadn't been shot in a war-zone and was about to die.
She mentioned that everything went well and one of my biggest fears that I had was waking up with a tube which came out of my body that was supposed to suck out any gallstones from the bile duct but she said there was no need as none were found and the liver looked fine too. While I was happy about that tube not being there I wasn't as happy about the catheter they had snuck in after the surgery while I was still sleeping, was my first time experiencing that as well so it did feel pretty weird not feeling the "need" to urinate as it did it automatically. Am I sharing too many details with you yet?
Alright so to keep things a bit shorter, usually after such a procedure the patient is supposed to go home after a few days and recover there with pain medication and a diet while watching what sort of heavy lifting or exercise they do (not that I've been doing all too much of that in general either) but weirdly enough the jaundice has still not disappeared even today after 5 days. They're not really sure as to why, either because I don't drink enough water even though they keep reminding me daily or because it took me such a long time to arrive to the hospital from the first day I got the symptoms. At this point it's getting a bit annoying having to still be here because of that though so not sure if they thinking there is a chance there could still be something else they might not be telling me about but aside from today they've been taking blood samples of me daily to check up on stuff. That practice alone has really put the nurses to the test as my veins are harder to find than Satoshi and after many have tried and failed to get blood from my arms I keep trying to tell them to just go for my hands to save themselves some time and myself some pain and bruises (my left arm looks like someone has repeatedly punched a blue eye on a daily basis for over a month).
Other than that, the pain has gone away even though they still keep giving me some painkillers and the pain which I thought was in the lungs since I wasn't able to breathe right after the surgery is also gone and turns out it was just muscles so now I'm able to fall asleep on the sides/belly which I couldn't after the first couple nights. Hopefully being able to sleep 8h+ will help my recovery and this yellow color to go away soon so I can be back home to tend to everything Hive and some gaming that I have missed quite a bit. I have of course been trying to curate here and there with my account on my phone and read up on happenings on slack, twitter and the OCD discord server but for the most time just been sleeping on and off in short periods.
Special thanks to the OCD team for keeping the curation going on finding great quality posts and to my lovely girlfriend @hiddenblade who's an experienced curator and has been taking the time off to help me curate more freely with the OCD accounts the past couple weeks, so if you've received curation that wasn't from the compilation post you should thank her for it. :)
I apologize for the community collaboration and curation project not being finalized yet, I am hoping we can get to it as soon as I'm home and a bit more back to my normal state but thanks to the ones that have stepped up and have been sharing their best posts from their communities in our discord for added curation. Looking forward to see what more we can do and how we can evolve so it helps the platform, users, retention and engagement even more!
Lastly thank you for all the wishes to my followers who frequently have read my posts, whether long, short, dumb, random gaming or crypto content, you've really made it worth having been active and given my all to this chain in the past 4 years to show that just being a top trending author is not what it's about, it's about the connections and the community and I'm so happy to be able to call this place my home.