Karen had a bit of trouble with pain last night, but managed to get some decent sleep anyway. She says it wasn't great sleep, but certainly better than she was able to get in the hospital. The doctors said recovery will be really slow, and it may feel like you're not moving forward, but to try not to compare one day to the next, and instead to think back to how you were a week ago.
What she found helped with the pain a lot at the hospital was to use a heating pad. So she put her heating pad on her stomach and fell asleep, only to wake up to burning hot staples. The hospital had an amazing heating pad that was temperature controlled with a water system which maintained a solid 42° C. It's comfortable enough to put directly on your skin or the clothes/gown directly above it. The one she owns is just a standard electric heating pad, so it gets to a much hotter 76° to 82° C, and can get too hot, even through layers of clothes.
A home health nurse came by today to set up future home health visits. It looks like there will be 3 visits per week for 2 weeks, and then 1 per week for another 2 weeks. They took her blood pressure and it's back to it's usual borderline hypotension. It was actually 86 over 52, which is lower than it's been the entire time she was in the hospital, but not unusual otherwise; so it would seem returning home has dropped her stress level greatly.
Some ostomy supplies were suppose to be delivered, but no order seems to have been put in - which is strange because they had called us about dropping off supplies a week ago. It seems like the social worker is to blame. We only saw her one other time before we left, and she didn't seem to keep up on what was happening.
