Throughout my hospital stay, it was always somewhere in the back of my mind that I should minimize the pain medication that I took. Forget that my husband is a highly trained expert in things involving pain prevention and management...that would be too logical.
For a C-Section, typically they give you a spinal, which is different than an epidural. A spinal is a one-shot deal, where an epidural usually utilizes a catheter to be able to continuously dose medicine for post-labor pain management. So after a C-section, instead you rely on narcotics and ibuprofen to manage the pain and swelling.
Anyway, after the C-Section, the nurse offered me my first dose of pain medication just as Dr. K was coming by for a visit. I was in no pain, because the spinal was still in effect, which I realized. Dr. K recommended that regardless of pain level, I should take my first dose while I'm pain free in order to prevent the pain from setting in. I don't know how many times I've heard Ajay explain how pain works and how much better it is to prevent pain than trying to make it go away. With this knowledge, I went ahead and took the narcotic and the ibuprofen.
The following day, I woke up sore...like hit-by-a-truck sore. I felt the pain one would normally feel after an abdominal surgery. I knew then what they were trying to protect me from the day before, and promptly hit the nurse button and requested my next dose...hoping that I didn't turn into a pain pill addict (which by the way, I was offered the choice of Percocets or Vicodin, and since I found that Vicodin was best when you take it on a sunny day and go for a bike ride weeks after I had a breast biopsy done about ten years ago, I decided Percocets may be the wiser of the the two choices for me.)
I continued to manage the pain this way for another day, and then I had the bright idea that I'd asked for the ibuprofen alone next time, passing on the Percocets. Why? Because obviously I should have been all better by a day and a half after surgery...right? Yeah, brilliant, aren't I? Again, I woke up in pain that was through the roof. What part of managing the pain before it set in did I not get???
So the other night at dinner with our Moms, my sister and Ajay, we were talking about when I took my last Percocet...Ajay noticed me flinching when I sat down. I told him about 12 hours ago. He reminded me that my dose was every four hours, and also reminded me what Dr. K told me, which was within a weeks time, I won't even be in pain and won't need them...so I wasn't doing myself any favors by trying to be a hero and suffering this week. That's when I told Ajay "but I don't want to drug up Alia". He looked at me. Finally he said, "you do realize she's outside now, right?" To which I responded, "while that may seem obvious to you, I suppose the honest answer is no, I didn't realize that she's no longer in there." Which, I realize, makes no sense---I see her on the outside every day...it's just that my primitive brain hasn't caught up with the new reality...
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