Thanks for all the love everyone, I feel it even from here! Still going well, staples out today... weird experience! Didn't hurt, just kind of weird! Didn't need the stitches removed from my tummy - they were dissolvable stitches - ta da! I need to go back to the hospital on Monday just for them to have a last look at the head to make sure all is well... then... well... then I can wash my hair! Thank God!
Stoneaxe - I think I will take my time... might try paddling on my knees first! I'm pretty dodgy walking so I think paddling would be a whole 'nother ball game right now! I'm a member of stand up paddlers forum (
http://standuppaddlers.ning.com/group/suptasmania ) down here, but have had a wee look at stand up zone and seabreeze.
MsMaggie - I had the best birthday ever, I was so grateful and I got about a million presents more than usual!!! How funny! Nothing like a brain tumour to get people spending eh?! I'm so lucky and fortunate.
I'm going to attach some pics (apologies for the giganticness of them) - I'm sure you can guess which ones are which - 6am at the hospital morning of the op with my friend Aimee (she looks a lot more frightened than I do! I look super happy!), 4 days afterwards (my head isn't as fat and swollen as it was to start with.. didn't put that photo up - didn't want to scare anyone!!! Having said that, please excuse the crazy hair!) and yesterday at my party with my giant cake Aimee had delivered (and yes, it tasted as amazing as it looked!). I truly am blessed, I'm really really fortunate to be following the road to recovery that I am, having said that, I like to think no matter what path I am following I'd be kicking some serious butt along the way!!
Right... klepto room mate. This is a good story. So I come out of the high dependency unit (which I think is probably a fancy name for recovery or ICU or something) the day after my surgery and I'm in the normal ward with one room mate, Rosa. Lovely lady, about 55 with a penchant for turning her tv on full blast at 11.30pm. The day after this I think one of the nurses asked if I wanted to have a shower... so I gave it a go (not realising actually, this being the first time I got out of bed, I was not going to be feeling great!) and was promptly quite ill in the bathroom. So I got back in bed, sans shower unfortunately but feeling a bit better. My friend Aimee came in to see me about 11am and I said can you please grab my dressing gown I left it in the bathroom when I was ill. So she has a look... no dressing gown. Mmm. I said well, the nurses probably just gathered up all the towels and everything I left there thinking it's all white and belongs to the hospital and stuck it in the wash. So Aimee's going about looking for it and no one knows where it is. So then she walks back in, and whispers to me, "does it have a hood?", yes it does I say, at which point, there's little Rosa toddling off past the front of my bed to the bathroom in my gown!!!! I sprang up and just pointed with my jaw on the floor! When she came back Aimee promptly stole my gown back to which Rosa was very apologetic saying she hadn't realised it was mine. Right... so we're having lunch and a cup of tea and I say, you know what that's so weird actually because yesterday, even though I was practically asleep all day and out of it, I'm sure there was a wall clock in here and this morning there wasn't. So Aimee says Oh my God, yesterday Rosa was having a conversation with a nurse about the clock and how nice it was (it was an ordinary, plain, boring, hospital wall clock) and asking where she could get one! So now we've established that she's stolen the robe and the clock. Then... she asks us if I have a spare knife from my lunch or a nail file - so I say no sorry. Next thing we know after dinner, once she does have a knife, she's unscrewing things from the wall, she has shoved three boxes of surgical glove in her bag and has nabbed a massive industrial sized bottle of hand sanitizer from the top of the cupboard! What a trooper!
On Saturday my friend came to visit with her little 3 month baby and the Lovely Rosa asked if she could hold him to which my friend said, umm, I guess so (I'd already declined the holding offer as I could barely hold myself up straight, let alone a baby!). At that point Aimee said you know what Rosa, I don't know that that's such a great idea, you know, you're in here having tests on your brain blah blah blah... so luckily she got out of it. Who knows, maybe the baby would have ended up in her bags too! Poor love, I think she was on a good cocktail of drugs including anti-psychotics so it's not her fault... having said that I still slept with one eye opened the whole time she was next to me!
