Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

This afternoon, Lisa took me in to Renown Hospital and their new post-surgical care center, which only opened this past week. This led to their automated system sending me an automatic message saying to go to 75 Pringle Ste 600, but me getting a call just as we arrived at the parking garage that I was to actually to go to Suite 900.

Things were not too busy and they took me to a room where they took my vitals, after which one of the surgical PAs came in and examined me. I told her about the swelling down below my belly button, and she looked at and felt it. She thinks that it's a common thing in this kind of surgery, and that as long as it doesn't get infected or painful or otherwise present as a problem, it should heal on its own. After checking me out, she had the nurse come in and use a surgical staple-removal tool to remove the "zipper" in my belly.

I expected the removal to be painful, but it was not. No local anesthetic was necessary, as they pulled each staple. There will be a scar, but the skin has knitted together pretty nicely and they think it was healing well. They did tell me to try not to itch it, but also to not apply anti-itch ointment for a while yet.

There's still some healing to go, but it really does look like things are looking very positive. I'm feeling better and better each day. I'm feeling much more optimistic about Kayla's planned trip to BC at the end of next month.

As part of the buy-nothing day protest, I was told that paying with cash if necessary was preferable. There's a Starbucks (and a hotel!) in the Renown Hospital complex in the building where my removal procedure was done. I used my Starbucks points, on the theory that I wasn't spending money that day. I don't know if that makes a difference.

After I got my coffee, Lisa and I went home. More about what happened after that in the next entry.

I could have dragged myself to my computer and gotten back to work today, but when the alarm went off at 4:15 AM, I decided that I would be better off taking one more day to recover from surgery. I got a bit more sleep and rested as best as I could. I'll return to work on Monday. Now this does tap my PTO more than I like, so this may have effects down the road, but I do neither myself nor my employer any favors by pushing too fast.

I don't have a lot of memory of this day, which was the first full day I was in the hospital after my hernia surgery. I think I must have spent much of it in my ICU bed asleep except when they had to wake me up to take the many blood tests and to inject me with various medications. Due to the excision of 10 cm of my small intestine, they had to essentially shut down my entire digestive tract. That meant no liquids at all — not even water. I was fed and hydrated intravenously, and there was a tube down my nose and into my stomach to keep anything from getting past there. This was no fun at all, and my memory of this time, such as it is, is of intense thirst.

Several people — Kuma Bear, Cliff Dunn, Cheryl Morgan, and others — tried to get the word out through various social media systems about what happened to me. Many of these social media groups are very much walled gardens, and regrettably some of them seem to encourage people to have the attitude of "If you don't post here, you don't exist."