Marathoner’s Hysterectomy Journey – days 4 & 5

Guess what. I’m bored.

So the first night’s sleep in my own bed on Friday night was decent for sure, I had to get up to pee once or twice but that’s my normal anyway. It felt good to get some real rest and not have such disruptive bloat-pain.

I’m really happy that after that last dose of 1mg hydromorphone on Thursday night at the hotel, I have only taken 1g of acetaminophen a couple of times. Period-cramp pain I can handle, pressure and pain from a backed up GIT, I cannot.

Yesterday, Day 4, I started going about my morning as I usually would, having coffee in bed and then I started very slowly and gently putting things away from the wedding/surgery trip and placing a few things, one at a time, into the washing machine. I watched some TV and did some shit on my computer, my mom came for a visit and then I started feeling sorry for myself. After she left I had a hard nap, which surprised me because I didn’t expect that just easily moving around the house over the course of the morning would tire me out to that extent. Have to remember that healing is energetically expensive!!!

When I woke up I needed air and I needed to move. I set out to walk outside for 40 minutes and ended up getting in 3km in 39 minutes. It felt good, and uphill is feeling better than downhill. I held my abdomen on the downhills again. I did some single-leg stands in the mirror (to ensure no hip-drop) for 45 seconds/side x 2, some thoracic extensions on the wall because I feel so hunched, and a bit more stretching. The fact that I can squat down to the floor to sit down, and stretch out my hamstrings and adductors amazes me. I have zero pain in the general crotchal region whatsoever – pretty much just tender from the ovary area to the belly button.

I don’t have much of an appetite still and I was scared of how my GIT would react if I tried to put down a whole chicken breast, so I had about a third of one, some rice and some salad and everything was fine. Still feels like period cramps, bloating is way down, just feel mildly tender at the abdominal incisions and I feel very paranoid about coughing/sneezing/laughing hard.

Walking really does feel fine, but I feel unstable. It doesn’t feel safe to totally engage the core so I’m not walking with a totally normal gait and I don’t feel like I can go very fast, which fine for now, obviously. But, I do look forward to feeling less sore/floppy/guarded through the abdominopelvic region as a whole so that I can ever-so-slightly increase the intensity of the walking.

Today I walked 4km. It also felt great. It’s hard to breathe diaphragmatically but I’ll keep working on it as time goes on. After a few visitors and some reading, I did ten minutes of very easy “yoga” – really slow and controlled bird-dogs, thoracic extensions, single-leg kneeling and making big circles overhead with my arms, diaphragmatic breathing on my back with hips and knees flexed, and then some side-stepping along the length of my house to keep the lateral movers of the hips awake and engaged.

It’s funny because I don’t actually feel like running still – my running burn-out seems to still be a thing – but because I’m not allowed to, I keep tricking myself that I “want to so bad.” I have to keep reminding myself that the break is good, I can set different goals for now, and once my abdomen doesn’t feel freshly stabbed and super vulnerable, I can start building up to really long walks on incline on the treadmill. I know I’ll be able to run CIM in December, and I actually feel pretty confident that my body will permit me to run it well, but this is just based on optimism and feeling better than I thought I would on the 5th day.

This is weird. I’m tired.

JK