Healing: Harder Than One Might Think

The thing about having an incision that goes all the way down your stomach, is that you cannot use any of those stomach muscles while the stitches are healing. For me, when ever I am going from a laying to a sitting position, or any time that I sneeze or cough hard, I have to hug a pillow to my stomach to support the stitches from pulling apart. I never realized just how much I use those stomach muscles on a daily basis. It is definately hard not to use them.

The other part about healing from surgery is getting my appetite back. Until last night, I had not eaten more than a couple bites of anything, because nothing tasted good at all. However, I craved a hamburger, so my mom went and picked a couple up from Chilis. Surprisingly, I ate more than half. I did not necessarily care for the taste, but I was so hungry from not really eating that I ate as much as I could stomach. The nurse in the hospital said that he had a lot of patients whose taste buds had changed after surgery. It is also known that after going through something like this, a person's body gets a negative nitrogen balance that makes them not really have an appetite. A person has to work towards changing it to positive. Which, believe it or not, is harder than you might think.

Since I got out of the hospital I started emailing with Courtney (from the newspaper article). The last email I received from her was on Thanksgiving day and she was telling me about a Facebook page that is all about MALS. This page, called MALS Gals, has girls telling their stories about what they went through and how they are doing now. It is pretty interesting and it was comforting to hear the "after" stories of how the girls are doing now that they have been through the surgery and the recovery.

My next step to moving forward in this recovery process is to stay active and out of bed. This goal seems to be pretty hard for me because I get worn out from walking or sitting up for a couple of minutes. I guess we shall see how I do on this next step. Hopefully I will be back at school on Monday.