Apparently, I've got a big gas gauge embedded in my forehead for all to see. It starts out each morning with the arrow pointing to "F" and steadily sweeps toward to "E" as the day wears on. I don't dispute the conclusion. A clear pattern has emerged in the week I've been home -- I'm pretty much in tip-top shape when I hop out of bed in the morning (OK, I don't really hop) and by evening I've become completely droopy. I'd say we have a pretty good handle on this pattern.
Today, however, we decided to mess with it. The logic, I have to say was, impeccable. But as I sit here around 10:30 in the morning, feeling like my gas gauge has already run halfway down, I wonder if I will have melted into a puddle of goo by dinner time.
The issue: My daily shower. This is probably my most physically challenging undertaking of the day. It's mainly focused on the chest incision and the other violations of my body's structural integrity, keeping them clean and free of infection. But there's other cleaning to be done, since one consequence of the surgery seems to be that my temperature control is all messed up and I do a lot of sweating (and shivering). It's a lot of physical work and burns a significant chunk of my daily energy allotment. On the other hand, I usually feel pretty good afterward.
For most of this week, I've been showering in the evening right before bed. But given that my energy reserves are already low in the evening -- a couple of times I couldn't deal with it all and just bagged it -- we decided to move it to the morning. Makes total sense, yes? But here's the problem. I ended up showering at the tail end of my Percocet dose. So all of the twisting, turning, stretching and bending in the shower -- ouch. And, of course, it's not just the pain itself that's the problem. Your body reacts to the pain by trying to stiffen up elsewhere -- and that's where I think the muscle energy gets burned. So I emerged from this morning's shower in sort of a deep whole-body throb and feeling like I wanted to crawl back into bed.
So what do we conclude for all this? I still think the morning shower makes sense. But we've got to fine-tune the Percocet schedule so I've still got ample quantities of the stuff on board when I tackle the shower. And maybe I'm going to need a more robust morning nap.
Update. Lori dissents. But if she wants to explain she'll need her own blog.
