its that little souvenir of a terrible year that makes my eyes feel sore…

I had surgery to remove my gallbladder on Friday. There was a lot of scar tissue around my gallbladder. My surgeon showed a picture of my gallbladder to Ian. Ian said his hands were shaking. My surgeon said “You probably won’t know what this is but-” and Ian cut him off, “I know what that is. That’s a gallbladder. We had an ornament on our tree shaped like a gallbladder.” The surgeon was surprised that Ian could identify basic organs, and so let him in to a little higher level of conversing about my surgery. His hands stopped shaking then too, Ian told me. Which was good, because Ian had been freaking out – “Is this the guy that took my girlfriend’s gallbladder out? Why the fuck is he shaking?” He told Ian about the scar tissue surrounding my now estranged organ, which shouldn’t have been there and was likely causing “the bulk” of my problems, and then he recounted the tale of how he cut it all out, with great extra cutting. I don’t know why the scar tissue was there. From what I know, that sort of thing comes about if you have had previous surgery; or for the gallbladder, it can occur with multiple attacks. I’ve never had any type of surgery and I’ve only ever had one attack. However, it was there, and it’s gone now. Besides knowing why it was there, I’d like to know if recovery is going slowly for me because of all the extra cutting and I’d like to know if I should expect that it might come back to cause me problems someday. I think I see him on Thursday, so this scar tissue matter will be at the top of my list.

For now I think recovery is going along as well as it might. Saturday I actually had more pain than I did on Friday and I got a little sad. But Sunday I woke up and felt the good kind of aches, as opposed to the hopeless kind, and began to think that maybe things were actually on track. Sunday was also the day I was supposed to able to come off of a clear liquid diet. Actually on Saturday night I had tolerated bread well. So I promptly overdid it on Sunday with an exotic mix of foods (all vegan and fat-free mind you) involving ketchup and maple syrup and needless to say I got real sick. Today I scaled it back to my vegetarian jello/veggie broth diet and added in a vegan pate, and again didn’t feel so hot. So again I was sad, but I preservere.

The one-skein wonder was finished last week; not as soon as I had hoped, however, because lucky me, a moxie day got me all busy in the Kingdom. But it was an easy knit, and I did learn a thing or two about picking up stitches, and I’ve started a second one in Debbie Bliss Alpaca silk. And its a great fit, but no no no pictures until this surgery bloat is cleared up. Good lord. I think that surgeons can be terribly insensitive about pumping us up with gas to do these things. I never felt more like a hot air balloon than when I walked out of that hospital on Friday night. Mind you that after the ERCP, the first surgery I had where they expand your insides with gas, I felt NOTHING, because for the past 8 months I’ve dealt with mind-blowing bloating.

Here’s the one-skein-wonder the first. In Lion Cotton, far less than a skein, and knit on 8 and 5 in the round.

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