Today I had chest x-rays taken and met with the surgeon who cut a hunk out of my lung containing melanoma three and a half weeks ago. First I met with his Physician’s Assistant who told me everything looked good except I had some excessive “stool.” I said, “What?”  She replied, “You know, poop.”  If any of you read my earlier blog about an annoying pressure in my upper abdomen which felt like a beer belly without benefit of beer, you will remember that the discomfort was bothering me more than pain which I could deal with. My surgeon arrived and told me from the surgery point of view everything was just perfect, great healing, great lung function, high five!  Yeah!  The problem causing my discomfort was too much poop in my upper intestine which I just learned extends higher than I thought up into your rib cage.  He assured me that the pressure under my breast bone had nothing to do with the surgery and suggested I try laxatives. It's bad enough to have all these cancers now I find out I'm full of shit.

Four weeks ago when the surgeon was briefing me on what to expect from my lung operation, he said, “This is very painful surgery.”  That’s about as heartening as hearing the pilot of your airplane say, “Oh shit!”  You expect the worst.  Well, the surgeon was right, to an extent.  Actually the surgery was painless, I didn’t feel a thing and I was pumping myself with so much morphine the first night I don’t remember much of that either.  It is when you leave the hospital armed only with a little bottle of pain pills you have to administer yourself that your duel with pain begins.  The first couple days I was popping two pills of oxycodone every four hours, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night to do so.  But then the pain reached what I considered a tolerable level so it was down to a personal battle between pain and me.  I don’t like to take medicines. So in defiance, I stopped the pills because the pain was no longer continuous.  It only came unexpectedly with really horrendous stabs in my back.  Because I decided not the take the oxycodone it reminded me of the old joke:  “Why are you banging your head against the wall,” the first guy asked.  “Because if feels so good when I stop,” the other guy responded.  Well, the sharp pains are over quickly, it feels good when it stops and I am still standing so I win.  Now the bigger problem is just an annoyance.  The surgeon said he was going to “freeze” the nerves in my chest area which supposedly make it less painful.  But what is has done is given me the annoying sensation that I have grown an upper beer belly that is pressing against my breast bone.  What bothers me is that I have a new beer belly without the benefit of drinking the beer.  Now that is really painful.

My friend the morphine pump

Women often say that if men wanted to experience real pain they should give birth to a child.  After my experience with lung surgery last Thursday I think I might have preferred taking a shot at childbirth.  However, with lung surgery pain you have an advantage, it’s called morphine.  I remember absolutely nothing of the surgery, very little of the recovery room and just became coherent enough in my overnight room to learn that the thing in my hand with the button and little green light would become my best friend.  When the little green light came on I pushed the button, opening the floodgates of morphine, drowning the pain and allowing a dreamy darkness to descend.  I became like Pavlov’s dog:  Feel pain, open eyes, see green light, push button, painless darkness.  Repeat. The clock was on the wall directly in front of me and every time I opened my eyes it was the first thing I saw.  I kept thinking what the hell is wrong with this clock?   It keeps jumping ahead ten minutes at a time!  I spent the entire night sleeping in ten minute intervals.  But at least they left me alone with my morphine toy.  By the next night I had been switched to oxycodone tablets which are not nearly so much fun as a morphine pump and the nurses kept waking me up throughout the night to take “vital signs,” give me pills and stick needles in my stomach.  When I finally got into some kind of deep sleep about 4:00 a.m., the door bangs open, the lights go on and the portable X-ray machine comes rolling in followed by the blood sample nurse. After another night of the same I was finally released.  Sunday night as I drifted off to sleep in my own bed imagining that all I had gone through was just a frightening nightmare, I began mumbling,  “There’s no place like home…there’s no place like home… there’s no place….”