Check me out.

Today, I had my first check-up with Dr. Prevedello in Columbus.

It was good to talk to him sober, since all of my chats with him in the hospital were clouded by my morphine buzz, falling asleep during our conversations, and just generally being a gross druggy. He did a little imitation of me today when he saw me. He said, "Wow, you look so good! Last time I saw you, you looked like this..." and then he hunched over and made a pissy sad face. Which looked pretty accurate.

He explained more about his surgical findings. He said I had a lot of scar tissue to clean out before they could even get down to the dura. Since I have a tendency to build up a lot of scar tissue and adhesions, that didn't surprise me. This is part of why he put the titanium plate in my head this time, to stop my neck muscles from adhering to the dura again. I asked him to talk more about the whole "your herniated brain tissue was ischemic/stroke-y, and dead and awful and compressed" and he confirmed that was indeed the sitch in my head, and it looked like there was stroke activity on both sides of that area of my brain. He made this mangled bad face when he described it, to really drive home how weird and bad it was in my skull. I totally love this guy, he's so warm and real.

It's too early to tell if the surgery was successful (and by successful, I mean - freed up some CSF flow in my brain, not me feeling all better). I will get an MRI in January to check on things. Then I should know more about how I can proceed with my life. lol.

In the meantime, I have been instructed to keep resting as much as I can, not lift anything heavy, all that usual post-op bullshit. But... I was cleared to start driving short distances around town and best of all....TO SWIM!!! YAY! This makes me ridiculously happy, since it's literally my favorite activity in the world. Guess who's going fucking swimming tomorrow?!? I'm not gonna swim a freestroke mile or anything, but just to get in the water will be awesome.

And in more awesome news, I got to pig out at the North Market with Carolyn today. Always worth the 2000 calorie lunch I end up getting.