I have had several phone calls over the last couple of days from the hospital and Doctor’s office as they try and schedule all of the appointments within the next two weeks. Everything is now happening quickly as I read articles and things about people being delayed surgeries and taking months to get in for things. The schedule of events I have so far are:
May 4th: Pre-admission at 8am where I get to go in and talk to people and get bloodwork done for 3 hours. It should be fun. I had a phone call today to schedule my bloodwork for my surgery on the 5th and I informed her that I had bloodwork scheduled for the 5th as well, so she cancelled my bloodwork that she had booked on May 3rd. It is surprising how much things can get lost. The person that called me was not aware of my appointment on the 11th and I will get another phone call to book and discuss some of those details instead of having a call once. I anticipate that it will be all over the place, just to be consistent.
May 5th: Exploratory surgery. This is when they will go in and inflate me up like a balloon to help simulate what I would look like if I was to gain additional weight. I hope they take photos as I will be under the whole time. They will fill my stomach cavity with a fluid to see if there are any stray specks of cancer floating in the space and then send it off to the lab. While in there they look for small sesame seed looking speckles on my organs. The surgeon is not expecting to find anything so he wants to proceed with the surgery on the 11th as quick as possible.
May 11th: Surgery to remove ½ of my stomach. They plan to take out the lower part of my stomach so I will then be left with the top half. The length of stay in the hospital is up to 5 days, so I will try and get out in a day or two so I can remain in the top percentile for recovery time. Since the surgery is on a Tuesday I anticipate I will get discharged by Friday at the latest. I am not sure how long recovery is for stomach surgery, online Dr. Jeffrey Campsen says 4 to 8 weeks before you can do difficult exercise routines. I was hoping to be able to build up my core so I could do the iron cross on rings, so that might be delayed a bit. They write that the fastest way to recover after the surgery is manage the pain, get adequate rest and move with physical activity. I will also need to chew my food for longer and take 30 minutes to eat my food. Luckily my youngest takes 45 minutes to eat, so I just need to use him as pacer.
Unfortunately I will be off work from May 11th till May 14th at the minimum and may extend more into the following week, but I think I might be good to go.
Dr. Jeffrey Campsen says to listen to the voice in your head to know what you can do. The voice in my head is pretty awesome and super confident. After a couple of weeks you can start doing more physical activity. The voice in my head is a super star and believes that I can probably start doing things 1 week after. I am not very good with pain and normally tolerate it far more than I should so I will need external assistance most likely instead of listening to the voice in my head. The voice in my head was telling me that my pancreatitis was just a minor inconvenience and that led me being admitted into the hospital. I like Dr. Jeffrey Campsen. According to him in 2 weeks I will be back to normal.