Tag Archives: MRI

Yesterday was a great day. It didn’t start out that way. Actually it started out with me *crabby* because the worst headache I’d experienced since I’d been in ICU kept me awake and nothing (neither ice nor Tylenol) did anything to alleviate it. I was so concerned that I called two on call doctors at the hospital and was told the same thing twice “Er… post brain WHAT pain? Er… I don’t know. You should either go to the emergency room or wait for your doctor. Yeh…” Finally, at the edge of a panic attack because I was imagining the worst, my surgeon’s nurse called me back. She assured me it was normal and reminded me that I had a follow-up appointment with my doctor in the afternoon during which he could prescribe something strong for the pain. Except due to the mastocytosis, my body can’t tolerate any narcotics. Like none. (Let’s hope I never need back surgery some day!). Then, like it knew it had caused me enough grief, the headache went away. Just suddenly and without any more drama.

Probably because of the fact that I woke up in pain and didn’t sleep, I was listless and cranky most of the day. It started out as the day where I felt the most like I had just had a huge operation. At one point, L. looked over at me and tried to order me to go take a nap (men are cute like that) to which I was all “I don’t want to!” and sat stubbornly in the kitchen doing nothing.

We went to the grocery store in the morning to make a Chilean soup that I love. (Okay, so I’m starting to miss Chilean food. You knew it would happen eventually, right?). It’s a soup with beans, squash, noodles, carrots, a little spinach, onions, and some aji de color (which proved to me trickier than we thought). Sometimes you can even add sausage to it. L. told me that was a personal taste thing, and I told him to do it. Yummmm…

At the store we once again carefully translated our list of ingredients and thought we had everything although the bay leaves that we swore we purchased never made it to the kitchen counter and we translated aji de color as red pepper. A better substitute would probably have been paprika because aji de color in Chile has very little of its own flavor. Like very little. Imagine me cooking (difficult to see, huh?) and I keep putting this flavorless, albeit colorful powder in my food because the flavor never seems to change. I know you are all mmmkay Sara so what happened? Well… I forgot to mention this little detail to L. and because I was still crabby and staring at the kitchen table he put an entire handful of red pepper in the soup. It turned out delicious, don’t get me wrong. It was just much, much, much spicier than any porotos con rienda (with or without s? L. and I couldn’t agree and neither can google!) that I’ve eaten in Chile and probably would scare off the majority of the population of the country. Fortunately for us we loved it and were too hungry to care that you had to eat it between big gulps of water.

See? Right color and all, just probably about a 6 out of 5 on the Chilean spice scale.

Also, yesterday I had my post-op doctor’s appointment with the neurosurgeon who performed my surgery. It isn’t often in the world of medicine and doctors and hospitals that you can say that you have a very good doctor who not only knows their sh*t but is a decent human being too. I wonder if it’s something about going to med school for so many years or the large paychecks that make some of them seem so cold and arrogant. Anyway, my doctor has a great personality and he’s a miracle worker as far as I’m concerned.

He told me that I’m doing amazing. I’m much stronger and my recovery seems to be healing faster than other patients he’s had with similar situations. However, he did warn me that on the scale of complicated operations mine was a 9 out of a 10 and that I should expect to feel tired and I should expect to rest for a month, or maybe even two or three.

He even joked around with me. It was almost like he had read an entry in my blog but he seemed to know exactly how much research I had done on my own about my case, him, the hospital and all my medications. He was like, “Sara, a piece of friendly advice: Stop reading so much and trust people more. I’m on top of this so you don’t have to worry.”

Oh…Okay…

Then, the nurse came in and removed the staples from my head which hurt a lot less than I thought it would. At first she said it would be like a wasp sting so I held on to L. forearm and squeezed tightly anticipating the pain and never even felt it.

I found out I do have titanium plates and screws in my head now but I can still go through the metal detector unlike a granny who just had a hip replacement. The doctor was all, “I did not turn you into an old lady! You will go back to being a fully functional twenty something in a few months.”  Good deal. He added that I should even travel for at least three months and strongly advised me not to live abroad for the next couple of years because they will need to monitor me closely.

He did also add that he doesn’t want me to do much of anything for the next three months at which point I will have an MRI and they can determine how my brain is healing. That includes working and exercise. Honestly, I was bummed, but I’m trying to take it like a forced vacation. He did say that he thinks I should be healthy enough to resume my MBA classes in September which is great news because I would also like to take a medical Spanish interpretation course at the U of M. However, he basically said not to be afraid to rest and take it easy and not to get frustrated with only small progress on some days. It’s like when I was in the hospital and they wrote my daily goals up on the white board that hung across from the bed where I was chained to a million machines. The sign read “1. Sit up in chair. 2. Eat. 3. BM” The final one took me a while. I was all BM? BM? What the eff is a B….oh! Awkward. You mean all my visitors know that? Great.

Wow…I’ve written a novel here. I should probably get going because L. and I are off to the airport to pick up my globe-trotting brother and his girlfriend.