Black Oak's Daughter

Life just gets more and more interesting.

I’m nearly 2 weeks post op now. Healing pretty well, but still very tender and tire easily.   I was talking to a friend yesterday and she mentioned dreams.  I’ve been pretty lucky so far with them. A lot of women that go through surgical menopause have very strange dreams for a few weeks while the body chemistry settles down. Between purging anesthetic and hormone levels renormalizing toward the zero level, it’s an interesting experience.

My wierd dreams didn’t start until a few nights ago. 

The first day or two that I was home, I had the most beautiful dreams. Roomie had spent the week before I went to the hospital finishing my bedroom.  We painted, hung a beautiful border, relaid the rug and put everything back where it belongs. It really is a peaceful beautiful room, and my dreams those first few days reflected that.  Most were of me and roomie on a beach or near a mountain lake, just loving each other in what I imagine to be the purest form of love.  It wasn’t just sexual, although that was part of it. It was a higher level of existing. Not really anything that I’m familiar with or that I’ve ever had with anyone before. Almost a mystical kind of love surrounding us, enveloping us, making us both feel good. Those kinds of underlying feelings that we had for and surrounded each other with made them much nicer than just a few sexy dreams.  I woke up smiling more than once those first few days. We don’t have that kind of intense love in real life. There is love between us, we care about each other, but it is expressed between us as friends. We talk a lot and smile a lot but since he’s moved here we haven’t crossed that boundary between being friends and being lovers.

I had heard how terrible the post surgical dreams could be and here I was dreaming my ideal life/love with a man that I wouldn’t mind it being a reality with. I could handle that.

The weirdness that I’d hoped to avoid started a few nights ago. The healing goes in stages, and I think I hit the next stage sometime last Sunday or Monday.  The staples are really hurting (they come out today) and the narcotics have run their useful life. They aren’t helping much with the pain level anymore and the side effects are too much to want to deal with if there’s no benefit, so I’ve been weaning myself off of them and onto tylenol.  I was addicted to them 7 months ago and I don’t want to allow that again, so I’m being extra diligent to keep the time frame that I’m on them this time to something reasonable and not months like it was when I ruptured the disk in my back.

The wierd dreams started 3 nights ago.  There’s been this old gray Buick that I keep losing. Last night’s dream, I swear that it was stolen. My daughter was much smaller of herself, maybe 6 or 7 years old, and all of her artwork from school that was in the car was left on the street  where I thought the car was parked. I had also left a folder with some important credit info in it on the front seat, and that wasn’t in the pile of artwork. I remember being concerned about that but I was too confused to deal with it. By the time the dream was ending, I had mostly convinced myself that I just forgot where I parked it again, but I couldn’t reconcile why my kid’s drawings and paintings from school were all where I thought I left the car.  I woke up pretty confused.

The night before that, we were driving around in the same Buick. I was sitting in the drivers seat, but I wasn’t really driving. I wasn’t really sure how it worked, but we seemed to be safe. We got out and did something and the car wasn’t where I left it, but we found it. That happened two or three times. We had to hunt the car down every time. It was just odd. I woke up thinking what the heck was that?

Monday night was less odd. There was the car, and a stuffed animal and I don’t remember anything else. Standard dream stuff, not really weird. 

I have no idea what the car dreams are. Probably my brain trying to figure out what the hell happened to my body.  I lost some parts, and others are still a little jumbled. Who knows.

I’ll ride the wave. I really need to get more rest than I’m getting. My sleep cycle is terribly hosed. I’ve been getting 3-4 hours at night and the other 3-4 in naps during the day.  I need to work at reversing that and getting used to sleeping at night again.

We’ll see what today brings. I see the doc in a few hours to get the staples out. I have a few questions for him, and he’ll have the pathology report that will determine my near term future.  I’m going to ask if I can take tylenol PM, that will at least help me reset my sleep hours to night time.  I slept on my side last night for the first time too. The staples were pulling, but I woke up so much more comfortable than sleeping on my back has been for the last 2 weeks. I’m just not a back sleeper.  I hope the staples out will allow more of the side sleeping. I’ll be OK if I can do that again. 

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