Five weeks down!

Today I am officially five weeks post-op!  Things are definitely starting to look up, and I am getting stronger and growing more independent every day!  I was a little nervous as to how I would feel today after spending hours on my feet celebrating Easter with family yesterday, but this morning I woke up feeling pretty darn good.  Mornings are generally the roughest in terms of pain, as I usually wake with some good stiffness, but today I felt suprisingly good!

I took some pictures of my incisions at four weeks post-op that I meant to post last week, but never did...so today is the day to post them!  The steri-strips have all come off, and things look pretty darn good.  The incisions are both still quite tender to the touch, but really feel strange when you do touch them...it feels like a thick rope under my skin, especially on my abdomen where there's more layers that were cut through.  I even grossed my dad out yesterday when I made him feel my belly incision! 

WARNING!  There's some incision pictures below!!

Here's the back incision:

The picture is a little blurry, but the incision is pretty thin!  I'm hoping that as time goes by, the redness starts to fade.  All of the surgical pen marks have finally washed off and there's no more purple writing all over my back!  I still have quite a bit of painful sensation to the right of my incision, but I've been trying to kind of massage the area when I'm just standing around...I found a tip online to massage the painful area so that the nerves "relearn" that they don't need to tell me when I'm touched that it's pain to try to get them back to their normal state.  Hopefully this works and this painful sensation goes away soon!

And here's a picture of the front:

I'm also quite impressed with how thin this incision turned out as well!  I think that the weirdest part of the incision is where my body jewely used to be (I had belly piercings on both the top and bottom, which you can clearly see from the picture and remaining scars!), and hope that these jewelry holes eventually close up too (the bottom one was pretty much stitched shut, but the top hole still looks pretty open).  Considering that the scar goes around the left side of my navel, I'm pretty impressed just how normal my belly button still looks!  Again, I too hope that the redness in this incision will decrease with time as well.  In fact, in looking at my scar today (just a week after this picture was taken), I already feel like my incision looks totally different and not so "fresh"...I'll try to post pictures of the change every couple of weeks.  This incision has come to be a running joke in the house, and is now referred to as my "front butt crack!!"  The abdomen around the incision is still a little puffy from surgery, and I'm not super thin to start with (although I'm down almost 25 pounds since this winter!), so when I push my belly inward toward the incision, it really does look a bit like a butt :)

During the course of last week, I really cut back on my pain meds and I finally feel clear minded!  I'm only taking one or two of the "good pain pills" daily, which has left me feeling the pain a little bit more (but it's definitely not out of control!) but I definitely feel more like myself.  I told my husband that I think that this past Friday was the first day where I actually was kind of bored here at home by myself.  Now that I don't feel like I need to nap every so often, I feel like I'll be able to actually concentrate on some of the things that I wanted to accomplish while I'm at home...like doing some good book reading and watching some movies! 

Unfortunately, I also started feeling additional pain last week, which may correlate with the reduction in pain meds.  Some of the pain that I had before surgery has returned, and I noticed it while out for my daily walks mid last week.  The pain is lower and less central than the levels where my back was fused...I was fused from my fourth lumbar vertebra to the sacrum, but I think that the pain that I am having (in reading other patients' notes and the location of the pain) is coming from my sacroiliac (SI) joint.  The picture below shows the relation and placement of these joints:

 
This is generally a common issue years after having a fusion at these levels due to the increased stress on the sacrum having a solid piece of bone sitting on top of it versus three individual bones with discs to minimize some of the stress.  But the pain I am having I know all too well and definitely had it prior to surgery as well.  I put a call into the doctor this morning to see what we need to do, and a member of his team called me back...unfortunately (although clearly the best route!), he said that we need to wait until this fusion is complete before we start poking and proding and testing for additional sources of pain.  This clearly makes sense, and if the pain is still there after my fusion has started to heal there are some diagnostic tests to see if the SI joint is also causing pain.  I asked if there could be arthritis in this joint as well, considering the extensive arthritis they found while working on my lumbar region, and he said for sure...we'll have to reach that road when we get there!  I'm definitely pretty disappointed to have this pain return, but we've definitely addressed a good portion of the pain and I can only hope that there are additional options if this pain remains once my lumbar bones have fused.  They have scheduled my four month post-op imaging studies (I'll have an x-ray and a CT scan) and follow-up with my surgeon, at which point we'll be able to tell if the fusion has been successful...this will happen during the last week of June.  I sure hope time flies by...although I feel really good, it's hard to not know whether this is actually working or not! 

Trying to stay positive!!