Happy Anniversary, Honey! Here's a Hank of My Blook Soaked Hair!

Alternative titles for this blog post: The Truth about Stapendectomies, How To Survive Not Washing Your Hair For Two Weeks, Vertigo! If the Room Is A’Rockin!... Also? Inner Ear Surgery Sucks Giant Donkey Balls.

So yeah. Not loving the surgery after effects. I mean, the surgery itself? Can’t remember a thing. They gave me something in my I.V. as I was getting wheeled into the O.R. and the next thing I remember is someone tapping my ear and asking me if I could hear them. Which I could. Even through the cotton ball and blood soaked gauze packing in my ear canal that needs to be there for two weeks. Then I tried to move my head and all of the sudden the room was spinning like a merry go round gone wild and I thought I was going to puke up my guts. So that was fun. Mmmm, Vertigo. Not something I’ve ever felt before. Not a fun sensation.

“Is someone here to take you home, Honey?” asked the nice nurse. “Because you’re going to fall flat on your face if you try to walk.”

Huh. You think?

So – yeah. Two days of spinning, shuffling, crawling, embracing the cool, cool toilet like it was my long lost mother (ah – the comforting curves of the porcelain bowl. I think I shall just sleep with my face right here. Except that I’m not supposed to get my ear wet. Damn.). Two days of puking. Two days of my poor kids looking at Invalid Mom like she came in and beat their old Healthy Mom down with a hammer and then slipped between the sheets with her partially shaved head (yeah, they didn’t TELL ME they were going to do that!) and gruesome stitches and Hospital stink and said, “Come here my little Dearies! Come kiss your poor Mama!”

FF was totally horrified when I walked in from the hospital. Took one look at the various bandages on my arm –(they couldn’t get a good stick for my I.V. at first) and basically wouldn’t stop crying until I peeled them all off. She is okay when Mama is on her feet- (which is not very often) but unhappy about Mama stuck in bed. The kid knows way too much about surgery and bandages and hospital type things. Spike looked at my stitches and said, “Um. That looks like it hurt.” And has generally walled himself up in his room with his comic books and Green Day since then. Though today he seemed relieved to find me on the couch downstairs and gave me a nice little kiss and hug.

Yesterday was Ryan’s and my fourteenth anniversary. As I have already alluded to, my gift to him was a big chunk of blood soaked dread locked hair that slipped off my head and onto the pillow for him to find first thing in the morning. Yum. And then getting to watch me creep my way back and forth to the bathroom all day as I puked up my guts. Mmmm. Hot! Jealous? Wish you had Vertigo, too, right? No, no, my gift to him, is, of course, the ability to hear again, which I can already tell, even through the gauze packing, is returning. I was watching TV at half the usual volume. I can hear cars driving by the house again, I keep hearing all these strange noises like airplanes and thunder and the sound of my children’s voices without having to say, “What? What? What?” every two minutes. So, yes, it will be worth it in the end, but try telling that to the woman lying on the bathroom floor yesterday. Because that woman? She was just pissed, pissed, pissed at her surgeon.