Recovery going well!

Of course, I have up and down days. And up and down "half days."
Yesterday, I can't describe it....for the first half of the day, I felt totally normal. This is something that I just do NOT feel!! Over the last 8 years, I might have a couple of hours of feeling pretty good, once or twice a year. But to go on for hours with this feeling that I am not a victim, an "injury victim," a patient anymore, well, all I can say is it was a feeling of elation and joy!

I thank God every day for the screws in my C1 and C2! Just those two transarticular screws mean the world to me. I fought tooth and nail for them, and now, in what seems in retrospect a simple endeavor, I have them and my heavy head is now firmly attached to my spine. Praise the Lord!

Already, the swallowing problems are nonexistent! I can't wait to see Dr. Ragel and tell him about this. About how much better I am feeling already and how I absolutely know that it's going to get many, many times better!

Boy, that's a lot of exclamation points.

I do still have pain. I was put onto a lot of painkillers in the hospital and I thank them for that. It showed me that a patient needs to be relaxed and out of pain in order to heal. Not writhing in pain. I did have a lot of pain in the hospital and was asking them for more painkillers every two hours, but they did their best to accomodate me and I do not recall having a terrible time. I liked it there!

So, I've been working to get off of them altogether, if I can. I'm already back down, pretty much, to the dosage I was taking before surgery. I'm proud of that. Now, I'm going to keep after it and see if I can get off, eventually, altogether. We'll see.

I look across the road and now I think, "I want to go walking over there. I think I can do it." We've been having a ton of rain for several days in a row, so I haven't tried. It's been several years since I've been over there (I wrote about this wonderful area to hike in perhaps the first year of this blog. And I also wrote about having to give it up. I'm praying I'll be able to get back into the woods with my dogs. What therapy that will be, what a feeding for my soul. It's been so long since I've been able to be out alone in the woods, and my life up until my injury had been spent alone on the trails and in the mountains and just out on the back of a horse.)

So, that's my update so far. Things going well, and expectations for even more. Thank you, dear reader.