February 10, 2023

Surgery Time

Mrguy's ladies have hammajang faces. 
Our faces are all buss.

Tuesday was a big day over here. Mrguy took our girl kitty to the eye doctor to have her eye removed. This was after half a year of trying to get that eye to perk up, including several 2-hour round trips to the eye specialist a month (each one of them including a stop by the side of the road to clean up her stress poo). He's been giving her eye drops 4x a day for months -- every option was tried. Then the eye gave up. Tuesday the eye was removed and she seems really happy. Kittenish, even.
Me? Not so much. While those guys were on their enucleation journey, I was on my way to have another basal cell removed. In the middle of my upper lip. My usual Mohs surgeon did the removal, and I really liked the anaesthetic. First they did a topical lidocaine around the area, then they did one shot that was less stingy than the usual lidocaine. Then they followed with lidocaine into the area which was now pretty numb. So that's the deal now? Much less painful than any other time I've had a shot in my lip.

They put a pressure bandage on me, and I came back two days later for the plastic surgeon to sew me up. They laid me down on the table and scrubbed the area and before I knew it the nurse was harpooning me like a whale. OLD SCHOOL. She just shoved that needle into the meat of my lip without so much as a howdy-do and let fly with the lidocaine which, as I mentioned, stings like a bitch. I think she even went through my lip at one point, as the anaesthetic was sprinking all over my face. Do I remember yelling "Fuck Meeeeee!!"? I mean I pride myself on handling injections pretty well, but I was out of control with pain.

It was at this point that I realized that my new phone had not slurped up any of the recordings that I have made myself or gotten from others. Things that I own but have dubbed (or mrguy has, tbr). I went back to my audiobook, but it's the part where Prince Harry is talking about meeting his wife, and not really good for surgery. I settled on Trevor Noah's audiobook. Not great for surgery, either. So I was listening to him describing how he and a friend made bootleg CDs for clientele in the ghetto -- not really restful.

I finally gave up on distraction when the nurse (call her Ishmael) started talking about her new niece and she and the surgeon were puzzling over the name, Freya. Neither was familiar with the name.

"It's the name of a Norse god," I lisped, from under my drape.

The ride home was long and painful and necessitated a stop at the gas station (but they have good prices out there!). Surgery #1 was only painful for a few hours. Surgery #2 had me weeping and begging for a gin and tonic, because Tylenol was really not cutting into it. I was decidedly less kittenish than the girl cat when I woke up today. I'm getting a good demonstration of how the lymphatic system works, which is interesting, and I guess the lip drains through the cheeks. My one cheek is outrageously fat. And now it's sore, too. However, after I took a bath I swear that my facial swelling diminished by 1/3. This is the after.

This weekend I will rest, and Monday I will go back to work. Sunday is Superb Owl. Maybe I'll watch that episode of What We Do In The Shadows where Nandor and Laszlo go next door and do Superb Owl with Sean, just for fun.

1 comment:

Richard P said...

Ow ow owwww!

"Call her Ishmael" — ha!