Sneezing is neither fun nor exciting. But I did it twice today, and it was a sign of my improving recovery from the surgery. I’d sneezed previously, but they were tiny kitten sneezes. Today, they were more normal sneezes, meaning my body did not try to shut them down because it could handle them.

Sneezing is remarkably violent on your body, given what it is. The second one especially lit up my surgery area, albeit briefly, and I recovered quickly. Nothing got pulled or stretched in horrible ways.

I slept last night without the beanbag and had no neck pain, hooray. I also was able to sleep on my right side, which felt more comfortable, and I believe this let me fall asleep faster.

Despite these things, my watch claimed my sleep was worse than the night before, but I am unconvinced. I’m not just going with my gut here, but as many other organs as possible, and they’re telling me my sleep was OK. Not great, but OK.

I took a nap in the afternoon and felt kind of blah afterward. This is normal and a reminder why I generally do not nap. If I need to rest, I’m better just laying down and closing my eyes without snoozing.

My overall energy level and movement continue to improve. I am eager for Friday to get the suture removed and finally stop worrying about accidentally yoinking it out somehow.

Today’s cat is meditative.

Last night I proactively set up in bed with the heated beanbag wrapped around the base of my neck acting as a kind of warm brace. And it worked! My neck was not sore at all the entire night. Did my sleep score improve? Yes! Was it good? No!

It was 57/100, which still counts as Poor (Fair starts at 60), but only two stats were poor and Deep sleep was actually rated Excellent.

The downsides of this sleep technique:

• It still took me multiple hours to fall asleep. This is even weirder when you consider how much less sleep I’ve gotten over the past week. I should be feeling more tired than I am and, barring pain, should conk out quicker. But whenever I normally go to sleep, I always start on my right side, which currently is not workable without issues, so maybe the on-back position is just not conducive to me nodding off.
• With the pseudo-neck brace in place, I really don’t move during bedtime. By the time my alarm went off this morning, just breathing in and out was uncomfortable due to stuff accumulating in my lungs and not getting shifted around by my usual night twitchings and shiftings. This can be fixed by coughing just enough to bring me wide awake.

I’m going to try without the beanbag tonight and see if the neck reacts poorly. If it does, I’ll pop in the ol’ bag right away and deal with it [insert meme here]. But being able to sleep in a normal(ish) position without pain or aids or whatever, would be dandy.

The other item of note today was my lower back getting sore. You may recall I have not had surgery on my lower back. I think it’s just because today I was moving, bending and stretching more like I normally would and my lower back was all, “Whoa, let’s not get crazy here, 10 days is not four weeks!” So I’ve spent the evening lifting nothing heavier than a glass of water.

Rooting through my cat GIFs, I find this one speaks to me tonight.

Last night was bad. I went to bed without taking any pain medication, which would be fine at this point, except for Cursed Neck™. Any time I lay on my back (the only way I can really sleep right now) the lower left part of my neck starts to hurt like [long string of expletives here]. This happened last night and for multiple hours I just laid there, hoping that maybe my body would exhaust itself and shutdown or something.

Instead, I took a Tylenol and a Hydromorphone pill (the opioid that came with the sheet warning of ADDICTION and DEATH) and had Jeff warm up the old neck beanbag thing, which is basically a long cloth tube full of beans that can get toasted up in the microwave. I wore this around the back of my neck, helping to relieve the pain, while also serving as a makeshift brace that elevated the neck.

It was getting close to 3 a.m. but it worked, and I actually slept decently for the next six or so hours. I’ll be using the beanbag again tonight, but at regular bedtime.

Meanwhile, I broke my admittedly short new 10,000-step streak yesterday, because I felt worn out. Today, I wanted to get some actual exercise and walked to Burnaby Lake and back. It went fine! The only time I felt myself straining was coming up from Lower to Upper Hume Park, which I did in one go. I was a little winded at the top.

I have 15,411 steps as I type this, the most since the surgery, so woo for that.

Here’s hoping the next week is all about improvements and feeling peppier.

A few photos from my walk, this time using the built-in WP gallery:

I believe I’m still recovering but the dramatic pace of the first few days, where I could see clear, tangible improvements every day, is now giving way to more subtle signs of getting better.

Also, one of those involuntary body reactions I’d been fearing happened today: a sneeze.

But it didn’t go the way I expected. What I expected was a huge, typical sneeze and attendant pain as my chest expanded uncomfortably and suddenly against the surgery area. Instead, the sneeze got up to that point, then sort of defused itself, and instead I just made a tiny kitten-like sneeze. This happened twice, and it was kittens both times.

A week later I am feeling more of the general soreness and achiness, possibly a combination of reduced pain medication and sensation returning at least partially to some of the numbed area (yes, I have numbness in my chest a week later. I’ve been advised via handout that this could end up being permanent).

On the plus side, there are times when I’m sitting and reading and can almost forget I had the surgery. It doesn’t last long, but I feel it is happening more often now.

Next Friday the suture in the chest comes out and the following Monday I have a follow-up CT scan of my chest area, to make sure things look OK. Sometime in around then I will likely get the results of the pathology report on the li’l mass itself. Hopefully it turns out to be nothing more than an inert lump.

And now, a random cat:

As promised, here’s my positive spin on the side effects of surgery!

Top 5 Most Favourite Things about Surgery (6 days later)

1. Daily incremental improvements in your stamina, sleep and health are rewarding, especially if you’re a stats nerd.
2. Being forced to slow down gives time to be more thoughtful, introspective and observant. This came into focus yesterday when I went for a walk and tried my usual pace (oops), then slowed down and really just took my time and soaked in the pleasantness of a warm spring day and the inviting breeze along the river trail.
3. The breathing exercises help reinforce good daily habits. Who knew this would be a side effect of coughing every hour?
4. Sympathy! It’s nice to know people care.
5. In a weird way, despite the pain and discomfort, the break from routine is refreshing. Sometimes change is good, or at least tolerable.

Bonus item, at least as of the first six days:

• Losing weight. I’ve dropped about four pounds. This is, I think, largely due to two things:
  • Less snacking.
  • Eating healthier food that doesn’t go straight to the proverbial hips.
  • A combined loss of fat and muscle due to much lower physical activity (I normally run three days a week and usually walk 4 km to and from the place where I run).

No doubt I’ll be as spry as this cat in just a few short weeks!

In a list, because I like lists:

• Today is my fourth day after surgery and third full day of being home.
• All gauze has been removed, the only stuff left is what’s covering the two incisions and I’ve been instructed to let that stuff come off on its own, no touching!
• The left side of my chest remains weirdly puffed out. Not in a horrible, wrong way, just in a typical after-surgery way.
• My sleep has improved each night, with my Garmin Forerunner (est. 80% accuracy) giving scores of 10, 28 and 48 the past three nights (out of 100).
• My left shoulder was still giving me the business when laying down as of last night. I’m hoping that improves starting tonight. I’ll probably try sleeping in a more upright position.
• My energy and stamina are improving. I hit 10,000 steps for the first time since the surgery, woo. I can climb flights of stairs without needing to rest, though I am definitely feeling it more when I get to the top.
• I can get the SPIRO-BALL past the 2,000 ml mark now, albeit briefly.
• I was able to do some of my usual chores without much difficulty.
• I secretly fear pulling out a suture.
• When I reach up for something I now do it with my right hand more or less automatically.
• 10 pounds is the max I can carry and I’m not really sure how much that is, other than probably not a lot? When I did my laundry, I carried it to the washer in three trips.
• Showering is still a bit of a nuisance, but manageable.
• I’m still doing breathing exercises and coughing every hour.
• I can yawn properly now. The first few days I could do something I like to think of as a micro-yawn.
• I found this image that might explain why my right wrist was sore after the operation, because the arm was likely trussed up for about two hours like this:

I’m pretty sure running will be the last or close to last normal activity I resume. The incisions should be fully healed in a few weeks and I’ll see how frisky and energetic I’m feeling then.

UPDATE: I went for a short walk (four blocks total) and yep, stamina is definitely not quite 100%! I did get shots of some flowers I took, though.

I was given this device to take home and use regularly as part of my recovery.

Despite appearances, you don’t blow into the mouthpiece, you suck air out of it. This causes the yellow ball to rise. My objective is to get the ball to the middle, where the happy face is:

On my first day home, I could do this, but only for a moment. Today, my third day home, I can now do it for multiple seconds, getting it up to the 2000 ml level. That may not seem like much, but frankly, I’ll take it!

The biggest realization for me coming out of the surgery is that while recovery may be relatively swift in overall terms, it will feel like ages to me. Before the surgery, I thought I’d be back to running possibly within a week (which genuinely gets a lol out of me now). The reality? I have stitches on my left side in three places that can’t come out for 10–12 days, so running, even if I had the energy, would be a dumb idea. And I don’t have the energy.

Basically, this has hit me a lot harder than I figured it would, even though what I’m going through is pretty normal for the type of operation I had.

My sleep has been poor, but is improving. I actually slept for multiple hours last night, which was nice. The sleep continues to be dreamless, though, and if my watch is right, I’m getting no REM sleep at all. But it’s getting better.

I am already much more mobile now. I can sit and stand like a normal person again, and move about without appearing to be in Grandpa Mode anymore.

Laying down is still a problem, which sucks because laying down for a nice nap would be ideal, but my left shoulder and side still ache when I recline. I mostly sleep on my right side, which is OK.

My appetite never suffered and I gained 1.9 pounds since the surgery. A lot of this is due to the reticence of my bowels to work normally. That has finally started to change, so I can hopefully stave off the Metamucil for now. I know this is TMI, it’s kind of unavoidable.

(Speaking of TMI [adjacent], they shaved my chest for the surgery pretty thoroughly–but only the left half. It looks very silly, but since I’m unlikely to go out topless any time soon, I’ll just let the fur grow back on its own.)

And on that note, I shaved my face this morning. That made me feel closer to normal. I could see enough beard growth to confirm it’s almost entirely white now. And I mean genuinely white, not gray, so I’d have a kind of professor thing going if I grew it out.

I will not grow it out. I don’t have a tweed jacket, anyway.

My energy, despite the lack of sleep, has also clearly improved. I won’t be running today, but I may venture outside, where it is a bit cooler, with some showers possible.

And in the end, I know this surgery may have prevented something worse eventually happening down the line. I try to remember that when I hit a bump in the proverbial road.

Meanwhile, here is a cat exercising.

And a photo of a flower I took when I went on a vast, four-block walk: