5/20 - surgery went well... back in the room



12:37pm

so here are some images taken shortly after i got back to the room. i'm just going to post with tine captions. i know, there's a lot of them. but now looking back at them i look pretty good. haha. swelling hadn't really set in yet. my nose looks all gross. that's mainly the iodine or whatever they use. it hurt too much and was too weird to touch my nose/mouth area for some time. so i just let it be.



12:38pm



12:38pm



so the best thing to have right after surgery is a little dry-erase board. yea, you can probably talk a bit, but it isn't fun or easy. my lips were pretty numb and not really wanting to work. of course it didn't help that my penmanship sucks. haha. it also helps if you have few sign language gestures. i can't tell you how many times i was wanting to say "thank you" or "hand me this or that" so the with the board and a few gestures right after surgery we did fine.

"lunch" came... jello, chicken broth, tea, grape juice and some sort of frozen treat. i was afraid of the broth. so tea and juice it was.

here's where the fun began. how the heck to get it in my mouth. well, a giant syringe and tubing contraption of course!

mom had to help me. i was still a little out of it but really thirsty. she sucked it up and then pushed it out. with the help of our silly hand signals we came up during the duration of the day we really got it down to a science.

i would put the tube in the corner of my mouth and shove it to the back where there was some room. i would close my fist which was the sign for keep pumping. i would open my hand, palm flat toward her for stop. then a simple little wave side to side to show that i was all done.

i suggest that you work something out like this with whoever might be helping you right after surgery. it worked well. although at one point mom did get the signals mixed up or wasn't paying attention and i almost drowned. haha

we had some more meaningful conversations via my cool wipe-board. it was easier to write things down then trying to get my lips to work right.

another way to communicate is using the iPhone app called iSpeech TTS. it's cool. you type in what you want to say and hit "speak". then it says out what ever you typed. it also allows you to save phrases you repeat so you only have to type them once. we also had some fun playing around with it. i had a British accent for a while. :)

the nurses kept coming in for blood pressure checks, temperature checks and medication things. i had to get my temperature taken under my armpit. for some reason i thought that was funny.