The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Rev Kane’s Wild Ride: The Doldrums

Well, we’re quickly coming up on a month since my surgery (4 weeks to be more accurate). I knew the first four weeks were going to be tough because of pain, lack of independence and a need for a lot of help. Happily, things have gone better than expected, I’ve had no major complications, the pain has been far less than expected (I haven’t even had any Tylenol today), people have been incredibly supportive and I’ve had a lot of help from a lot of great people and have been able to be more mobile and independent than expected.

A lot of the literature talks about the mental state after surgery, people often go through some heavy emotions and a lot of folks get depressed. Given my history with depression, this is something I was a bit concerned with during my recovery. I’m happy to say none of that has been an issue so far. One of the things I was concerned about in recovery are the next three weeks. We’re coming up on a weird time, colleagues from work are between semesters and many are leaving for the summer, the heart surgery thing gets old. By that I mean, people thought that how they would need to support me would be to literally walk with me, cook and clean for me, etc… I’ve been mobile enough that really they’ve been mostly conversation and company (which I highly value) with moving some plants and some grocery runs involved. So, it’s not quite the imagined emergency they thought it might be, I look and am doing well so a little motivation falls off. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve still got plenty of help. But at this point, my old friends have all reached out, we’ve had our long conversations and things are about to get a bit quiet.

So for the next few weeks I imagine things will slow down, I’m still not back to normal and I expect things to get a bit boring over the next few weeks, we’ll see how it goes. My hope is that as I continue to feel more normal, my interest in reading and writing will come back stronger and that will be what gets me through the next couple of weeks. ~ Rev Kane