Complications messing with my plans. (Post-op update 4.)

I hit a little snag in my surgery recovery over the weekend. My mouth filled up with blood immediately after I got out of bed on Saturday morning.

As I’d learned from the steel door incident last summer, it’s awkward trying to control a bleed when it’s coming fast. My mouth kept filling up and filling up, and every tissue I shoved in came out soaked, and I had to do it quickly because the bleeding was constant, and I found out that it’s really tricky to continuously stuff tissues in and out of your mouth without getting blood everywhere while calling the doctor’s office and writing down the after-hours emergency phone number and then hanging up and calling that new number that’s not saved in your phone. I stopped with the tissues just long enough to gargle my brief message through a mouthful of blood when the emergency voicemail picked up. Do these kinds of post-op snafus ever NOT happen on a weekend?

Fortunately, the blood wasn’t coming from my graft. It was coming from my palette, the tissue-harvesting site on the roof of my mouth. The transplant site is fine.

It’s an excellent doctor who calls you back within two minutes of leaving a message, let me tell you. Have I mentioned before that my doctor is excellent? He is. He called right away and calmly made sure I knew that this isn’t an uncommon event, that the palette can and does re-open and gush blood. It was reassuring that he said “gush” when I hadn’t described it that way, because it meant that he was familiar with this scenario. This truly is a thing that happens.

He asked me whether I’d done anything that would’ve elevated my heart-rate. I said no, but thinking of it later, I guess I made the mistake of doing too much while not wearing my stent. I’m only supposed to have the stent out while I’m “sleeping or lounging.” I’d had it out the day before while I was doing things around the house, i.e. light cleaning. If I’d then had restless dreams that created tension in my mouth or caused me to press my tongue to the roof of my mouth, that could’ve done it.

Anyway, it all ended well. I followed the doctor’s instructions, and twenty minutes later, the bleeding stopped. The problem was fixed, over, and done within half an hour. He told me to put my stent back in and leave it in for 48 hours straight, as I did at the very beginning.

And that’s what brought me to the challenge of steering my mental state back toward the positive: I’m worried that I’m back at the beginning, since the clotting came undone after nine days of healing. Will it take another nine days to get to that point again? Or has the wound healed enough from the inside such that it’s not as deep now, so the healing can pick up where it left off? I’ll find out when I go for my two-week follow-up on Thursday.

In any case, the incident created a set-back that disrupts my plans. You know how I feel about my plans. I admit that it’s been a bit tough keeping my spirits up.

I was so confident when I checked in with you last Thursday, too!

I miss actual food, and I don’t know why I torture myself watching mukbangs on YouTube when I can’t eat.

Speaking of food, I did decide to step on the scale this morning. I was ready for it: I’ve lost six pounds. I’m back down to 115. I’d figured as much, even though I’ve been trying to consume more calories this time around. At least my nutrition is solid, and I know that I’ll regain the weight soon once I can eat normally again and get back to lifting weights. Of that, I’m 100% confident.

I added that last sentence lest this post dissolve into the whine-fest I didn’t want to write. I actually wasn’t going to share this incident here at all, but you’re here with me on my gum-grafting surgery adventure because I brought you along! I’m keeping it real.

On a happier note from Saturday morning, I went back to bed after the bleeding stopped and woke up to find Nenette sleeping on the pillow next to me. This is what I saw when I opened my eyes: