I came out of surgery with 4 new holes in my knee and a new incision. I'll go back a week from tomorrow to get the stitches taken out of all of my new battle wounds. Jessica and I were joking over who now has the most scars on their body. I definitely have the biggest quantity now, but Jessica thinks she might win if we added up the lengths of all of them...I don't know...
I'm sure you're all wondering how Baby Dennison did through all of this, since he was our biggest concern. We did fetal heart monitoring before surgery, after surgery, and the next day before I left the hospital. He didn't seem phased by any of it! His heart rate was perfectly normal. The only sign of my stress/pain was that I was having a whole lot of Braxton Hicks contractions. (These are essentially practice contractions, and are not real labor.) It's certainly normal to have B-H contractions at this point in the pregnancy, but I was having them every 10 or 15 minutes for a while, probably due to the strain on my body and the pain I was in. Our doctor, Grace, wasn't very concerned by this since his heart rate was perfectly fine. In fact, she even joked that maybe all of the B-H would make my labor a little shorter since my uterus has had so much advance practice! I can only hope!
I ended up staying the night at the hospital on Friday, then left around 6pm on Saturday. I was very happy that I ended up in a private room so Nate could stay with me. I was comforted to have him there to hold my hand and get me things I needed so I didn't have to call the nurses every single time. The first couple of days and nights were pretty rough, but I was determined to take as little medicine as I thought Baby D. and I could handle. I think I toughed it out pretty well, and am proud of myself on that front.
I am already getting a bit stir crazy at home, though. It's really hard to be relatively immobile when you're the type of person who enjoys staying busy. I want to exercise so badly right now. Or even just go for a walk! I'm trying to remind myself that I am actually doing something important (recovering from surgery and growing a baby), but I'm still feeling some cabin fever. It's actually easier in some ways when I'm in more pain (generally 5pm and later every day), because then I don't feel like doing anything but sitting or laying around with my leg up. It's surprising how much more painful it is when I try to stand up and all the blood and pressure rushes to my leg.
The surgeon, Dr. Li, said I would need to be on crutches for a couple of weeks, but the physiotherapist at Matilda said it would take longer thanks to the giant baby bump (my words, not hers) that I'm hauling around these days. I think I'll go with Dr. Li's estimate! I'm hoping to start physiotherapy in the next week, but until then I'm doing the stretches/exercises the PT at Matilda gave me.
