§ RPLND
It has been a week and a half now since my RPLND surgery and I’m recovering mostly fine, save the bloating.
The surgery took about 6 hours and nothing out of the ordinary was encountered during the surgery. I had an epidural for the surgery (which they almost pushed me off of the operating table putting in) so I was up and walking the next day. The doctor pushed hard to get me on my feet as soon as possible. The effectiveness of the epidural was amazing. I felt great. I could tell that I had a large line of staples running up my stomach but didn’t feel really sore.
I spent a week in the hospital recovering. Long story short on that one is lots of laps around the floor, some diarrhea, no real poop, and lots of bad food. And bloating. Oh, the bloating. I can’t fart.
The epidural came out a few days after the surgery and thankfully I’ve not needed any extra pain meds at all. Which is good, because they’d only add to my constipation.
We got the pathology back. Four teratomas removed. One was baseball sized. Another a little bit smaller at around tennis ball size. Two more taken out but I kept forgetting to ask how big they were. One of the teratomas was encroaching on a blood vessel my left kidney. Fortunately I’m a rare freak who has multiple of these blood vessels running from the kidneys so I’ll only suffer a small loss in kidney capacity because of it.
The bad, or rather ambiguous, news is that two of the teratomas showed presence of low grade Adenocarcinoma. On its own that is bad, but here it was contained within the teratoma, so we’re just gonna keep an eye out over time. Not the “All Clear” I was hoping for.
All in all I’m recovering OK. I’m eating well slowly returning to the land of pooping human beings. Today has been good and I’m hopeful that it’ll just keep getting better.
If the bloating hangs on for much longer its going to start getting really hard. It is already keeping me up at night and when I do sleep I get some wicked weird dreams. Walking helps with the bloating, but I’ve also been cold and it is a little chilly out (I can’t seem to regulate my body temperature at all) so I’ve just been walking around the house to get a little exercise in.
So here’s hoping that we’re done chasing malformed cells for a while. In the mean time the rest of the year is just gonna be:
Gonna try to make the best of the remaining year with the wife and hope that next year is better.
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