I tried eating today and encountered a problem.  Food caused my stomach to expanded and my expanding stomach pushed against my abdominal wall and that felt very uncomfortable.  It took me over two hours to eat an apple and a serving of toast was about my limit.  I took to calorie dense foods to get around my perpetual hunger and ate some cheese.  The cheese tasted wonderful and that’s mostly what I ate for the day.  Drinking also proved uncomfortable for the same reasons as food so I felt pretty dry most of the time.

Late in the day, I felt like I had a bowel movement coming so shuffled over to the toilet for the first time post surgery and waited.  Normally, I would have pushed a little to get things moving but the muscles involved in that proved unresponsive or were in pain so I could in no way help my stool along.  So I sat and sat while taking sips of water.  I felt foolish after 30 minutes rolled around but I certainly had no where to be.  The pain meds made me a bit loopy making studying out of the question.  So I simply sat.  Three and a half hours later I pooped and I felt like I should look into the bowl to find a golden egg based on the effort that went into birthing that single tiny turd.

My mother checked in on me every three hours or so and I received a medication of some sort every six.  It was odd being checked up on.  These visits seemed to happen around the clock and there were stretches where I wasn’t sure what time it was despite having ready access to a clock.  Each activity had to be temporarily relearned in some way that I didn’t need to use my abdominal muscles.  Sitting upright required rolling onto my side and using my arms to push me up while rolling back.  Coughing, sneezing, and laughing all hurt like hell and I was perpetually hunched over at about a 15 -25 degree angle from the horizon.  I didn’t have the mental capacity to listen to audiobooks let alone study and I passed the day in an indolent stupor.