Okay let’s just get this out of the way…this is my wound today:

According to the “wound care specialist” who came today, this is “healing nicely” (*gag*), to the point where she doesn’t feel I’ll need to see her again because in another month or two, there will be no wound to speak of. Just really fragile scar tissue.

The wound is that orange-y colour because it’s being dressed with Inadine, which is this sheet of stuff that looks like fly paper and is just as sticky, but it’s basically a square of gauze that’s been infused with Benadine, which is some sort of iodine type thing. It stains the skin/scar tissue and gives it that lovely hue. The breakdown areas around the bottom (the pink parts) are because on Saturday I wanted to have a shower, so Blake taped me up with drape, which as I’ve mentioned before, is like clear MacTack or shelf paper but for skin and we thought we had a good seal, but didn’t because of this STUPID tape they have us using called Hypafix that SUCKS and long story short, I got water all on the INSIDE of my dressing. It was FULL of water, Blake poked holes in it to drain it so we could take it off, so the wound got totally soaked and as we found out before, too much moisture leads to a breaking down of the very fragile tissue, and too little moisture stunts healing, so it’s gotta be juuuuust right or the whole thing just doesn’t work.

So there it is in all its glory.

I went to the doctor this afternoon, just got home. Just to my general practitioner doctor, not my surgeon, because my surgeon doesn’t want to see me again until I’ve got a date to have the procedure I need and since she’s not seeing me regularly anymore, she doesn’t feel comfortable prescribing all of my meds, so she wants him to do it. So he did. I thought it was going to be a fight to get him to rx me extremely heavy opiates but he gave me a year’s supply without an issue so “yay” on that. He also explained that the drugs I’m on are specifically to keep my cholesterol low (because the pancreas processes cholesterol? I think that’s what he said?), which is why I’m on TWO cholesterol medications, Lipidil and Crestor, and to keep my stomach acid low (I was on Pantaloc for that but he switched me to “something new, something better”). I’m also on another drug called Clonadine which he didn’t question at all, so I guess I should be on it after all. I was told at the hospital that I take it so I don’t become a hydromorph addict. Works for me, I guess.

The other reason I saw him was because over the last few days I’ve been having really sharp pains right in the middle of my stomach, just below my ribs, pain that radiates into my back – the SAME pain I had the day I went to the hospital to begin with, just not as bad, which is why it’s somewhat alarming. The three days I’ve had this pain, it starts off really bad when I wake up but tapers off in the afternoon and I figure that’s either because I’ve eaten or because I’ve reached a certain drug serum level or something from taking two doses of hydromorph and about 8 Tylenol 1s. I asked him if it could be that I’m passing another gall stone or plural stones and he said it could be, that if it persisted I should go to the hospital for an ultrasound to check it out. So I guess I’ll be keeping an eye on that.

And now I’m home and the kids are home and I’m having a bummer day so I’m gonna take my chips and go hide in my office and close the door.