You CAN Go Home Again.

Melissa and I are safely home.  I love it.  She loves it.  We are home.

I have been giving a lot of thought about this blog.  I put up a new poll to ask how long I should keep it up, but I think I may keep it up for a while, regardless of the response.  I mean, it really does help me as a kind of self-therapy.  I get to share things here that I wouldn't normally vocalize.  (I'm not that much of a seriously emotional guy.  I like to keep things quick-witted and on the surface, mostly.)

Moving forward, I thought I would document my recovery and try to organize this blog into something that might be helpful for others who have to have the same kinds of things happen to them.

I have recently been inspired by another website, a forum, where people actively talk about their experiences.  It is Meningioma Mommas.  The link is http://www.meningiomamommas.org/.  On this site, there are several remarkable people who have survived the removal of various sized and shaped meningiomas.  The reason I was drawn to their site, even though I did not have a meningioma, is that they have all undergone similar open-skull operations to remove their tumors.  As such they have treaded the same waters I am heading into.  The have been a wonderful resource to me in just the short time I have been posting on their site.

I would like my site to become however small a resource to whoever may find themselves in similar situations.  I went through this with my family and friends but with no one who had had any REAL experience with this kind of thing.  There is certainly no reason to do so with so many good resources out there.  I will try to find more and point to them here on my blog.

Anyway, back to documenting my recovery.  I am 16 days post-op and am currently taking no meds other than those I was taking before the surgery, with one exception.

At 16 days, I am still in a great deal of discomfort.  My head actually still hurts, I have a headache on top of that, and my tissues are starting to itch; way down deep inside, they itch.  I understand this will get MUCH worse before it gets better.  My head is also still swollen in the temple areas.  I am bruised in those areas as well.

My pain levels wax and wane with the day.  In the mornings, when I awake, pain is the worst, at about a 7 or 7.5.  Once up, however, I use ice packs, meditation and walking to try to refocus.  By the time I have taken a shower and had coffee, the pain has become manageable, say about a 5 or 6.  As the day goes on, I try to relax, meditate, get soem exercise by walking and pain goes down to about a 3 or 4 by midday.  Then, pain goes back up in the evening.  By bedtime, I am back at about a 6, taking aValium so I can get to sleep again without being anxious that I will wake up in even greater pain.

It's not all bad.  Days are great, nights are bad, but for the most part, I guess I am healing.  My left eye is now about 2/3rds open.  It is still swollen in the lid area, so I expect to get full eyelid motion back.  We'll see.

Other than the head area, I feel great.  I sneeze about 2 times a day for some reason and sneezing is a trip.  Anything that makes my scalp move is a trip.  They cut away all the muscles fromt eh side of my face and re-attached them to the new bone areas.  All that muscle cutting and reattachment makes the muscles pull in bizarrre new directions.  Very trippy.

Hopefully my scar will stick around a bit.  I have a hard time holding on to scars.  They heal to nothingn on me.  Maybe this one is big enough it will stick around.

Well, that's it for today.  I will update in a while to see if anything changes.  Keep thinking good thoughts out there, people.  This, too, shall pass.