Coming back, a little

Warning: There is a really gross picture at the bottom of this post, so if you cannot stomach really gross pictures, you might not want to scroll down.

Some things they don't tell you before surgery but should:

• This is one of the most painful surgeries one can have. It also take a very long time to recover from it.
• You will be under the knife for 2 1/2 hours. During this time your eyes will be taped shut and you will have a breathing tube down your throat. This means that when you wake up, your eyelids will have sticky gunk all over them and stick open and shut, your face will be covered in other sticky gunk that you can't remove, and your throat will be so sore that you cannot swallow, in addition to that horrible pukey waking-up-from-anaesthesia feel that you will have. Also you will have lots of foul-tasting burps from the oxygen tube. You will almost puke with the burps.
  
• You'll have to pee like a futhermucker since they will have drained an entire large bag of fluids into you during the surgery. But you will not be able to get up to walk because you are too loopy. When the nurse attempts to assist you to pee while you are lying in the bed, you'll be unable to relax those particular muscles enough to go.
  
• When the nerve block wears off ten hours before they say it will wear off, you'll be cursing the God that caused you to exist.
  
• Perococet does not do much for pain that ranks a 9 on the 1-10 pain scale. It can handle pain up to about a 7. After that, you're on your own.
• If you take the maximum dosage of Percocet in a day every day, you will not be able to poop. Your stomach will swell up and become hard. You will stop eating because though there are things going in, there is nothing coming out. You will have to send your man out to the pharmacy to buy you stool softener which you will take and pray. When you finally do poo, it will suck a lot.
  
• Showering is agonizing. So is taking a deep breath. Holding still and moving both hurt. A lot.
  
• The day after surgery, when they start your PT, you will cry. You will cry like a little girl. Your man, who has been an absolute angel through all of this and who has accompanied you into the PT room, will turn white and sit down fast when you start crying like a little girl. You will feel guilty about this.
• Anything you drape over yourself to keep warm will get stuck in the stitches that are sticking out of your arm.
  
• You really won't be able to move your arm. At all. It will feel weird, painful, and gross.
• Your ability to sympathize with anyone else's pain will dry up like a salted slug, because their pain cannot possibly outweigh your pain. You wish for the luxury of having only emotional pain instead of this physical agony.
  

Anyway you probably get the idea. This has been total suck-city. When I went back to the doc on Friday after the surgery, he said, direct quote, "I shit you not, this is one of the worst shoulders I've ever seen. When I laid you down on the table to operate, your arm fell out of the socket." He had intended to do a few simple ligament/tendon repairs, but wound up stitching the shoulder back into the socket, fixing the torn rotator cuff, and shaving bone that had been damaged in the process of my shoulder being fucked up for years before I fell skiing. He also told me that the left one is just about as bad as the right one was.

So. I have been looped on Percocet since the day of the surgery, but the times when I wake up in the night after it wears off have been clear-headed and angry. I am eager for this time in my life to pass. Very eager.

I am going to go lie down now.

I hope you all are better off than I am just now.

Gross picture, taken during the surgery: