The worst part of the recovery from the mastectomy for my wife was constipation. She was full of it, and that’s no joke. Not funny.
This has been a recurring problem for her through the years whenever she had to be put under anesthesia, starting with her first caesarean section for our son. There was some trouble but nothing serious. She realized how serious it was with her second C-section when our daughter was born. Our child came out ready to go home, turning her head when she smelled the nurses’ pizza and keeping her eyes peeled on television when her mother gave her the bottle. In particular she liked the dresses the women wore on Dynasty. But my wife’s experience was different this time. She wasn’t passing anything, no gas, no urine and especially no poop. She was worse than the cheap guy at church who refused to pass the collection plate. Our daughter was ready to go home after a couple of days but her mother couldn’t leave until her bowels woke up and passed something.
One night the doctor came in and said if she didn’t pass something by morning he was going to cut her open again to see what the problem was. Talk about having the you-know-what scared out of you, my wife’s bowels were open for business by the break of dawn.
For the mastectomy operation, she was passing gas and urine all right so the doctor dismissed her, thinking the poop could not be far behind. It wasn’t. She said it felt like a stick up her you-know-what, and it hurt. She couldn’t find a comfortable position to sleep in. She didn’t want to eat because she knew it wasn’t going anyplace soon. Every trip to the bathroom was agony.
She endured every remedy possible from prune juice to enemas and milk of magnesia. I have been at her side through more than 40 years of various illnesses but have never seen her in so much discomfort and outright pain.
Eventually all the remedies joined together in her intestinal tract to block the logjam. At last she experienced relief, and I was relieved for her. Since then she has been back to her old ways of being a tough cookie as she progressed in her recovery. The draining tubes come out next. They can’t be as bad as the constipation, at least we hope not.
Everything about cancer, it seems, is crappy.