Recovery

I am recovering nicely.  It's been great having my mom take care of me and the family.  I could sleep the day away and not worry about everything getting done.  I couldn't have had this surgery without her being here.

By Wednesday of last week (1 week after my surgery), I was so hungry that I was becoming very irritable.  Eric came home from work and grilled chicken breast for the family.  I decided to chop it all up and make it into chicken salad.  I had to figure out some way to eat something other than soup, yogurt and ice cream.  Ahhh....the chicken salad went down nicely.  No pain, just a little discomfort, but my stomach felt better.

On Thursday, I was starting to get some of my energy back.  I was able to have some of the left over chicken salad for lunch in a salad.  My mom made me scalloped potatoes for dinner.  Yum!

Friday, Eric takes me to the doctor for my post-op appointment.  She takes my bandage off and says that it is healing nicely.  All of my diagnostic tests have come back and my thyroid was not cancerous!  Yahoo!  She shows me a picture of my thyroid after she removed it.  The nodule was really huge, lumpy, and irregular in shape.  It needed to come out.  I'm not supposed to resume strenuous activity yet, I'm supposed to let my synthetic thyroid hormones start to kick in before going all crazy with the physical activity.  Oh yeah...I am cleared to drive!!!

Saturday, I'm feeling more alive again.  We go to a friend's house for a bar-b-q.  By 10:00 I'm exhausted!  the problem is I wake up feeling really good and fool myself into thinking that I am back to normal.  By the end of the day, my body is reminding me that I just had surgery a little over a week ago.

Sunday morning I wake up with a sore neck.  I tried to get comfortable the night before and sleep in my normal sleeping position.  Apparently, my neck does not agree that I can do this yet.  I'm achy most of the day.  I've started putting scar cream on my neck to help with the healing.  I've been instructed to keep the scar covered when I am outside, or keep it slathered with sunscreen.  I spend about 45 minutes in CVS reading sunscreen labels.  The picture above is from Sunday.  I keep looking at it wondering what it will eventually look like when all of the healing, both inside and out, is complete.

This morning (Monday) I took my my to the airport.  She's going back home.  I'm back into my mommy position. You can tell she's gone already...there are dishes in the sink, no candles burning in the house, and all of the flowers are gone.  It's quiet in the house today.