Gonna get knifed!

[sinanju]

I saw my surgeon today.

--the guy who worked on my case in June (when I was in the hospital with pleural effusion AND an abdominal abscess), and who performed a colonoscopy on me a couple weeks ago. The scoping was to try to determine what caused the abscess in the first place. Back in June, I was too full of nasty stuff and swelling for them to be able to tell even with CAT scans and x-rays.

Now we know. I had a perforation of my colon. Also, diverticulitis and a bleeding polyp. He removed the polyp, which was tested and proved to be benign. Or as we keep saying around Casa Sinanju, "Yay! It's not cancer!" On the other hand, I had a perforation in my colon. As the surgeon told me today, I "got away with" having a perforated colon once. I shouldn't press my luck. It could perforate again. Leading, in unfortunate cases, to peritonitis and other complications, up to and including colostomy. Not something I care to risk.

So he's gonna cut me up on the day before Thanksgiving. That's next Wednesday, y'all. A week from tomorrow. It should take about two and a half hours, and he'll do it laproscopically with three or four incisions. It will be followed by two or three days in the hospital, and then a couple of weeks recovering at home before I can go back to work.

If I still have a job. See, I just started a new job a bit less than a month ago. It's part-time, with no benefits, but it brings in enough money to ease our finances while still giving me time to work at my writing.* But even if it were full-time and had benefits, I've only been there about three weeks. So tomorrow I'm going to have to tell my boss that I am going to be unavailable for about three weeks, starting next week. And I'll tell her that I'd like to come back to work after that--but that if they have to let me go and get someone else in to do the job, I'll understand. And I will.

And even if I have to find a new job, I'm a lot more hopeful about my prospects than I would have been a couple of months ago. For whatever reason, I got lots of return calls to applications and emailed resumes in this last round of job hunting--a far better response than I'd gotten in any of the time since I was laid off. Some of it was no doubt due to the Christmas shopping season; I applied for some seasonal work. But a lot of the responses were for office jobs of the non-seasonal sort. One temp agency in particular has been very persistent in trying to get hold of me. I told them I'd gotten a job and was unavailable, but they'll be my first stop if I have to go job-hunting again after I recover.

*In theory. What with illness, surgical procedures, and other fun, Snippy and I have been doing well just to handle the basics of working and doing the absolute minimum of household chores. But eventually...I'll start writing and publishing again. Because that, not another dayjob is our real hope of changing our financial situation in the long run.

Comments

[fikgirl]

Good luck!

I'm having an outpatient thing done on the 21st, but it's nothing as complicated and risky as what you're going through. I'll keep you in my thoughts.