I had my surgery on Friday. I’m not quiet as invalid as I was thinking I’m going to be. I’m able to sit up at the computer and blog, and might even get back to my writing once I return from the Andromeda Galaxy, where I’m recovering on the good ship Vicodin.
I’ve been getting asked a lot what the surgery was all about. It’s kinda personal and kinda gross, so if you’re got a weak stomach you might want to skip this part. The procedure was something they call “excision and fulgration of an anal condyloma.” I speak doctor from my days as a medical transcriptionist, so I’ll translate that. A condyloma is just a fancy doctor word for a wart, but it’s a big ugly wart. Actually, I don’t know that it was ugly, since I’ve never seen it because of where it was. Though I did find some examples on Wikipedia, and after seeing those I really don’t want to see it. Excision is just a big word for cutting something out, and fulgration as defined by Wikipedia is “a procedure to destroy tissue (such as a malignant tumor) using a high-frequency electric current applied with a needle-like electrode.” So they knocked me out, cut off as much of that thing as they could, then burned the rest away with a little electrode. Fun, huh?
Okay, the icky part is over, you can start reading again now.
I was off in La-La Land throughout the procedure, as I insisted on general anesthetic. That way, I just blink and it’s over. The last thing I remember was them putting an oxygen mask on my face while the radio in the background was playing “Relax” by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. After what seemed like a blink, I was waking up in the post-operative recovery room. They brought me some graham crackers which I gobbled down ravenously. Since I couldn’t eat or drink after midnight in preparation for the surgery, I was starving.
I have a weird stress reaction at times like this: I make jokes. Like when the anesthesiologist came in to talk to me, I asked him, “Where’s your club?” They always ask me if I feel safe in my home environment, I told them I’m fine unless we’re in the car and Jim is driving.
They called Jim to come get me. I wasn’t able to drive home because I don’t have a pilot’s license. I was flying pretty high from the Vicodin and the lingering after-effects of the anesthetic. Then I had him take me somewhere to eat because I was hungry enough to eat one of the nurses.
They gave me dressings that look kinda like Stay-Free™ napkins and gave me a prescription for Vicodin. This morning I went over to Rainbow and bought a package of Depends and actually it turns out they’re quite comfortable.
Recovery has been a pain in the ass – literally. I can’t do any heavy lifting and with the pain meds I can hardly stand up sometimes. Dr. Willis, the surgeon, estimates that I’ll be down for about two weeks. Sitting’s not a lot of fun, either, as I’m sure you can guess. I had to buy a special cushion to sit on. It’s not one of those cliché donut-shaped pillows you see on TV… the doctor says those are a bad idea. The cushion will come in handy later this year when the Chorus goes on retreat. The chairs we sit in to rehearse there are ghastly uncomfortable.
The Chorus will be starting up again in a couple of weeks, by which time I hope to have Grunch Road out there on the market. It’ll be on Amazon and available to book stores. I am so excited at having this first work published that I already feel the sequel coming on. A series of them, actually, set at a bizarre college of my own fabrication. This will be a departure from Grunch Road, where all the locations were real places from my childhood. Right now I am compiling subplots to weave together. Hoping to have this one out next summer, and have it actually be long enough to be considered a novel.
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