Day: 18 February 2020

To be honest, there isn’t a massive amount to report about today. When the nurses checked on me this morning my vital signs were all fine, so they gave me some more drugs and the all clear to head home.

They offered me breakfast but it turned out to be toast and corn flakes, two of the worst possible foods to try and force down a sore swollen throat, so I gave them a miss. At least there were a few tinned peaches which were pretty easy to eat.

I had a flying visit from the surgeon who reassured me that the pain would get a lot worse over the next few days before it got better, so that gave me something to look forward to! Then they wrote me some scripts and medical certificates and let me loose into the sunshine. My dear wife and taxi driver had parked a few blocks away and I’ve gotta say, after being cooped up in hospital it felt good to go for a stroll in the sun. The downside was, I walked past a few coffee shops on the way and realised I’m really going to miss hot coffee and pastries over the next week or two.

We got the scripts filled on the way home (the pharmacist had to get ‘the good stuff’ from the safe out the back) and I grabbed some more soft food (soups, chocolate custard and rice pudding!) for sustenance at the same time. After that it was a pretty uneventful day.

I cooked scrambled eggs for breakfast and as far as ‘foods to eat after a UPPP’ they’d have to rate pretty highly. After that I dozed on the couch most of the day – there has been some minor bleeding from my throat but I don’t believe it’s anything abnormal. My normally insatiable appetite has been pretty much non existent, and I’m not sure if its caused by the painkillers or the fact that swallowing is so painful. Either way, I nuked a small tub of chicken soup at about 2:30pm, did some more dozing, and hung out with the kidlet when she came home from school. Ate a little baked potato (mashed) for tea and chocolate custard for dessert. Protein ice cream and a hot chocolate to round out the day, while I blogged and the wife caught up with Phryne Fisher.

Calorie wise, the last two days feel like they’ve been really low, and so has protein. Part of me is hoping/wanting to take advantage of the low appetite to drop a little fat but the other part knows I need to eat enough to heal up! So I’ve got this weird dichotomy going on – I need to force myself to eat, but not be silly about it seeing as I’m not very active and can’t train. My poor disordered brain is just muddling through at the moment.

Now I’m ensconced on the couch, ready to try and pass the night away upright in my recliner. Hopefully I’ll get at least some quality sleep.

Being that the surgery is done under general anaesthetic, I wasn’t allowed to eat anything from midnight the night before the surgery – and I wasn’t even allowed to drink water from an hour before my scheduled admission time at 11am. So on the day of the surgery, I headed into the hospital to be admitted. Lots of paperwork, confirming my name and date of birth multiple times, then into a bed to wait for my turn at surgery.

The first time around I was there until after 4pm before they sent me home, and as you can imagine by that point I was pretty famished! Thankfully this time around there were no unforeseen delays and I was in a gown by about 12:30 and being wheeled towards the operating theatre by about 1:30. A bit of a chat to the friendly anaesthetist, a cannula in my arm, and into the theatre we went. Part of me was a bit disappointed I had to move myself from the rolling bed onto the operating table – it wasn’t like the hospital dramas on TV where they pick the patients up to move them. The anaesthetist put an oxygen mask on me, got me to take some deep breaths, and then fired some Fentanyl into the drip – the next thing I knew I was waking up in recovery a few hours later.

The first thing I noticed was the pain, or lack of it – after lots of reading about this operation in the lead up, I was expecting to be in agony but it was really not too bad. Turns out I’d had local anaesthetic injected into my throat while I was under, and that would take a while to wear off. The second thing was that I didn’t feel sick at all – last time I had surgery under a general anaesthetic I felt awfully nauseous in recovery, and I had serious concerns about that this time because vomiting after a throat operation didn’t sound like a pleasant experience at all! But I needn’t have worried, they may have given me an antiemetic just to be sure.

After they monitored me for a while they wheeled me into a ward for the night, dosed me up with some painkillers and offered me some food. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but after not eating all day I knew I could use the calories, and I was pleasantly surprised to be able to eat a plateful of (soft) food and a bowl of custard for dessert without too much discomfort.

The nurse gave me some medication intravenously to reduce the bleeding (I had a couple more infusions of that during the night and the next morning) and then it was time to settle in for the night with Netflix and a jug of ice chips to suck on. And honestly, for the first few hours it wasn’t too bad at all – I was pretty comfortable, stayed hydrated and well entertained by Bojack Horseman. But eventually I started to struggle to stay awake and decided to try and get some sleep, which is where the fun starts. I couldn’t really sleep properly while sitting upright because the bed was a little short for my long legs, so I laid the bed flat and tried to sleep that way, which was a fatal mistake. I snored like mad, my throat got very dry and painful, and by 4am I was frustrated and exhausted. Luckily at that point the nurse stuck her head in and offered me some more pain relief which I gratefully accepted – a good thing she did, as my neighbours on the ward were probably ready to smother me to stop the horrendous snorting noises I was making. But the Endone kicked in so from then on I lay upright, browsed Facebook and dozed until the lights came on. It was only the next day when I read a US hospital’s recommendations to NOT lie down to sleep in the first few days after surgery, I wish I’d read that sooner.

At one of my toilet visits during the night, I risked a look in my mouth. It wasn’t a pretty picture – the back of my throat was black with blood and stitches and I had a bunch of black blood blisters and fun stuff on my tongue as well.

Well, I’ve managed 2 weeks without a skipped meal or a binge, and got into a pretty good routine.

Then yesterday I went to hospital for some surgery. This was the second time I’d been in to have the operation (I mentioned it in this post) and this time it went more to plan. I had a UPPP done, which should help (or hopefully cure) my snoring and mild sleep apnea. It meant an overnight stay in hospital, and I came home this morning with a very sore throat and scripts for strong pain killers and anti-bleeding medication.

I’ll document my recovery on my less private blog, but wanted to post here about how it’s impacting on my relationship with food.

On the negative side, there is a part of my brain that is quietly hopeful I’ll lose a little weight during the recovery process. A combination of extremely painful swallowing and opioids means my appetite is genuinely very low. I’m having to force myself to eat because I know that I need calories to heal – and I’m also scared I’ll lose muscle mass since I can’t lift weights for a week or two either. I don’t want to feel like I’m restricting/dieting because I’m scared of the consequences later but it’s not easy when every swallow is painful.

On the positive side, I’m really limited to soft foods for the next week or so until the pain subsides a bit, so a lot of the foods I normally eat are out of the question. This means I’m forced to step out of my comfort zone and try some stuff I wouldn’t normally eat – so I’ve bought chocolate custard (which was YUM) and rice puddings and soups and some very special looking ice cream and will probably go out hunting for other treats once I get through that lot. And also… it’s a couple of weeks where I can totally switch off from work, catch up on some Netflix and truly relax a bit. I need to avoid lifting weights too, and although I mentioned it in the negative column, a break from the gym is scary but very much overdue. I’ve been training pretty hard for a lot of years without any extended break and the little injury niggles have built up over time, so hopefully I’ll come back a lot fresher and pain free.

So I guess I’ve got mixed feelings right now, I can’t wait to feel better but will enjoy the time out anyway. And hopefully, the end result will improve my quality of life (and prevent a snoring related divorce!) which would be a win for the whole household, really.

Be kind to yourselves!

I had a UPPP performed yesterday so I thought it might be interesting to document the process and my recovery.

For some background, my wife complained about my snoring enough that I went to my GP last year and got a referral for a sleep study. I had that done in-home (which was an experience in itself) and the results came back that I had mild sleep apnea, although when I’m in REM sleep or sleeping on my back the number of nightly AHI events tipped into the moderate range. I tried a mandibular splint, which seemed to help but was a nuisance and gave me a sore jaw.

After further consultation with my GP he suggested I see an ENT specialist to discuss surgical options as he felt that my throat anatomy could possibly be the cause. The specialist ultimately agreed that with my enlarged uvula and narrowed palate that I was a good candidate for a UPPP, although she couldn’t guarantee it would completely fix the issue. My research (read: googling) seems to suggest that it probably has a 60-70% chance of significantly improving the situation, so although I’d initially planned on paying out of pocket (I don’t have private health insurance) I chose to get it done in the public system. The specialist put me on the waiting list and I was booked in for the surgery about seven months later. Unfortunately on the first scheduled date, there was some sort of delay with a surgery prior to mine and I was sent home to await a rescheduled date. Thankfully the new date was only a couple of weeks later and yesterday was d-day for my uvula.