Day after surgery

On the morning after surgery I was told that I needed to be moved into a four-bed bay from my side room. I didn't actually mind too much as I am usually quite social and so long as I had good ear plugs, I thought I would be OK and I was. The other three ladies were much older [early 70s] and one had a tracheotamy which made her breathing a bit noisy, but she was a lovely lady. The other lady was a retired nurse, and I think possibly had early signs of dementia, and the other lady had a goitre removed, but had an infection and a temperature. The nurses moves all my belongings into the new bay and I settled in well, with the toilet conveniently near by.

One of the things that don't often get discussed are how anaesthesia affects your bowel and bladder and whole physiology. My bladder was very slow for about 2-3 hours, and even though  I was drinking a lot, I was hardly passing any urine. They did a post-void scan and it did show my bladder was totally empty, so it was obviously working.

In the middle of the afternoon my surgeon came to visit me to see how I was doing and said that my drain hadn't produced much more blood since the evening before when he visited me, so the nurse removed it and it was very nice to get rid of it as it was literally a millstone around my neck, and not very pleasant at that.

My surgeon asked me to do various movements with my arm which I managed well, improved with my hypermobility. Best of all my hand was warm and there were was no longer any pain between my hand and elbow, although obviously still a lot of pain local to my neck, chest and left shoulder, fully to be expected.

My surgeon explained that he had resected my anterior scalene and removed about half of my first rib. He didn't botox pec minor as originally plannd as he strongly felt my pain was coming from neck, but this can be reviewed in a few weeks if it needs doing in an out patient setting.

This is how I looked after my drain was removed;