I’m going to take a break from telling the story of my past to update a little on my VNS. I had my VNS surgery 4 days ago and so far everything is going well. They sent me home with Percocet which was absolutely needed for the first day or two as I was in a lot of pain. I’ve been taking it sparingly since… mostly at night so that the pain doesn’t wake me up or keep me from going to sleep.
I fully expected that my neck would hurt the most. Something about having your neck sliced open just didn’t seem appealing. It is actually the least painful of the two incisions. I can almost turn my head left and right today without pain, though I still don’t have full mobility.
It was really only a day and a half after my surgery before I was able to eat solid foods. I didn’t throw up like many patients do from the pain meds. My throat was just sore from having a tube shoved down my throat I suppose.
My chest is the one that still hurts. On a scale of 1-10 I would have to say that it’s mostly a 3. I did opt to have natural child birth and I request no pain meds when I have work done at the dentist so I may not be the best gauge of pain. My incisions are closed by both dissolvable sutures and dermabond (the fancy name for super glue for your skin). I did something completely insane last night. I started picking at the glue because it was irritating my skin. My husband told me to stop picking but I just couldn’t. I managed to pull most of the dermabond off of my chest. After reading about it later, I became acutely aware that the glue is supposed to stay on for about 2-3 weeks and will eventually start peeling off. It was a really stupid thing to do on my part but I just couldn’t stand the way it felt. Now I have to get some sort of liquid bandage to replace what I tore off. I didn’t appear to have opened my wound,. That would have been really bad. If you happen to be curious what it looks like when it comes off of your skin… it’s basically just like you would expect dried up glue to look like.
As for my healing wounds… it is kind of hard to truly tell what they look like because under the glue and the yuck there is still the marks that they used to ensure they were cutting in the right places and there is betadine under the glue. You can see that my chest is quite bruised. That’s likely because of the foreign object placed in my body there. I would not encourage anybody to use these disgusting photos to determine if they should ever have this procedure done. They won’t look like this after awhile.
I still have a week and a half before we turn the device on and right after that an appointment at the surgeon’s office to check the wounds and perhaps remove the glue (the correct way). I will update with continued progress of my healing.
”You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience by which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’” – Eleanor Roosevelt
I ordered this to see if it will serve as a replacement Dermabond!
Living the Epilepsy Life 