A Pre-Op Update, 12 days to surgery!

CW: discussion of weight loss through caloric restriction, food cravings, potential surgical side effects, medical trauma and mental health.

This might be the most chill I've been before any surgery, major or minor. I absolutely prepped more for my carpal tunnel surgery than I did for this hysterectomy.

I mean, having a total hip replacement exactly eight months before certainly helps. This one is an outpatient surgery as long as there are no complications. I'm going to pack my normal hospital bag expecting not to touch the dopp kit, but being overly prepared anyway... which never hurt anyone.

I'm even getting that started today - I just mended my surgery robe, which has become my favorite summer robe in general, even with the dropped hem in the corner I've been conveniently ignoring because only my family ever sees it. But, if my surgery team is going to see it, I had better actually take the 20 minutes to fix that 😅😅 I also rescued my cervical pillow and my sugar skull lap robe from my cats, who had dragged them under the bed... I rotated my mattress last night, which made getting at them a lot easier than crawling under the bed. All of the above is currently in the washer getting cleaned and sanitized, before it gets packed and stashed in my closet, away from the cats and their protest peeing. I'm not staying overnight this time, guys!! Probably.

I asked my surgeon what she recommended for preparing the house for post-op, and her number one recommendation was to have a few days worth of meals in the freezer. My mom, of course, blanched, considering she hit a good sale and stocked the freezer to the gills not long ago... but I learned last time that having a rice cooker was just as good as having pre-prepped meals. I'm definitely planning on eating a lot of fish, rice, and frozen veggies, all I have on hand already, so I don't even have to go out and stock anything beyond a few Bare Bones bone broth sticks.

I will likely bake a couple of loaves of bread, make a couple of batches of my fudge balls for easy, healthy snacks, and put some lentils on to sprout right before going on the operating table. Not a full meal prep, just making a few things easier on myself.

And, of course, my mom also has a much better handle on cooking for my diet than she even had back last January, so her planning meals that I can eat helps a lot, too.

Recovery time is six weeks, and in that time I can't take a bath or use a hot tub (that's pretty standard), do any swimming at all (the actions of swimming use the core and pelvic floor muscles in a way that can tear the vaginal cuff open as it's still healing), or lift anything more than 10-15lbs (that's my normal weight max, anyway). I do have to get up and walk around as much as I can to prevent blood clots, which is fine, I get depressed if I can't get out of bed after surgery, you can't keep me in bed. I have my post-hip replacement walker on standby, just in case I need a little more support getting up and down than normal as the incisions are healing.

As for the eliminating of the meds and supplements, I've been off of my iron and magnesium supplements now for two full days, and I'll be giving up the Meloxicam and the rest of the supplements - including the flaxseeds I eat for breakfast every day - in another three days. Meanwhile, they haven't said a word to me about my marijuana use in two pre-ops. I guess they've decided cannabis and anesthesia don't interact with each other. Back when I started the Major Surgery Merry-Go-Round in 2021, they made you quit using THC two weeks before surgery. Then it was one week, then it was five days, then it was three days...

Unlike Certain People In American Society, I'm not going to be pissed off that I was inconvenienced by rules that were later found to be an abundance of caution based on a lack of science in the area at the time. I also know full well, because a nurse navigator flat-out told me, that I don't HAVE to go off of every single supplement, it's just so confusing to cherry pick which ones you can and can't have, it's easier to tell patients to abstain from all of them. Do I have the time to cherry pick? I sure do. Does the nurse? Hell no, and I respect that.

As for how my body is handling not getting the supplements its used to, it's starting to throw tantrums via cravings around 7pm. I keep telling myself that as long as I feed the cravings nutritious food, I'm okay - I'm about 20 lbs smaller than I was when I had the hip done. I am to the point where a few extra calories before surgery would give me some extra energy for healing. But, it's weird going from a year and a half of eating in a calorie deficit, to eating definite maintenance calories... that's the difference of a whole extra meal, I'm just not used to being this hungry anymore. I'm not judging myself or anything, I'm just kind of afraid of making myself sick 😅😅

And because you really do need to think of every weird little thing, considering I have a good six weeks of not being able to reach my toes coming up, I'm still deciding whether to very carefully do my own toes (at my podiatrist's encouragement, I've gotten a lot better at it!), or whether I want to go get a real pedicure before the cut. I have eleven days to decide, the countdown is on!

And I know I haven't done a hair growth update in a while... I'll likely go down to every other month updates at least for now, with June/July going up next week, and August/September going up after hysterectomy recovery. After a whole month of cancer scare, and preparing myself mentally for the possibility of losing my hair and having to start the challenge over again after I finished treatment... not having to lose my hair was a relief it's taken me a fair amount of time to come to terms with. I didn't really want to talk about my hair at all, I felt like I would jinx such amazing news. Particularly considering I have a LOT to share about my hair. As I've been distancing myself from it, and then re-introducing myself to it, it's been growing like a weed in the background. My initial goal of chin-to-waist length in one year, that I calculated based on my end of 2025 hair growth rates and after some thought walked back to bra-strap length because it sounded so audacious... at the halfway point of the challenge, it's not sounding too audacious anymore. Even with a six week slow-down coming up soon. So, that should be quite the update.