How you feel right after surgery…and pain m
This is a very individual reaction.
I didn’t have any tubes or even an IV after surgery. Pretty much all the
pain was a product of my horrible spine (horrible is, according to my
orthopedist, a sound technical description for the condition of my spine 
I also had some (unexpected) big problems with breathing — I have one
collapsed lobe for no known reason — and I had just recovered from the flu
at the time of surgery. I was just not able to get enough oxygen and my
levels fell below 50% for awhile (causing an actual panic!).
With ALL of that, none of which were related to the RNY, I was back home by
Friday, having had the surgery on Monday. I had virtually NO pain related to
the RNY itself, except for some discomfort connected with the healing
incision. And, because I had been loaded up on steroids in the hospital to
control the asthma and to get the inflammation in my back down to a bearable
level, the incision healed very slowly compared to others who had the same
incision. Three weeks after surgery, I still had a big hole — and everyone
else who’d had surgery that same week I did (the doctor works with us in
groups by date) were fully healed. A week after I stopped the steroids, the
incision was healed.
The surgical pain was by no means “over the top” or even close to
intolerable. My back hurts a lot more on a daily basis than the surgery did
at any point.
A word about the morphine drip. Be aware that opiates don’t make pain go
away. They make YOU go away.
If your goal is unconsciousness, it will do the job very well indeed. Real
anti inflammatories and other pain killers actually deal with the pain while
allowing you to function. Also, opiates are very constipating. The more of
them you take, the less bowel function you will have.
I have had a LOT of surgery in my life, including a spinal fusion and
laminectory in the unenlightened years — 1967. I was desparately sick
following that surgery and there was a general opinion going around that I
might not make it. Then I got a private duty nurse who talked to me and got
me to stop taking morphine. Within three days, I started to improve.
Opiates retard healing, just as steroids do. I know that when you are in the
hospital, they encourage you to use the morphine drip. This is as much for
their sake as yours — doped up patients do not require much attention and
most hospitals are short-staffed.
Discuss pain meds with your doctor in advance … and take into
consideration any other issues that might affect your pain levels. Be
emphatic. I tried to explain about my back before surgery, but there was an
attitude that “all very heavy people have back problems.” This is
undoubtedly true, but in my case, the back problems preceded the weight
problems and have become intertwined with the weight issue. Following
surgery, when they tried to get me up, they discovered that they
couldn’t…my back was so inflamed and so agonizingly painful that they had
to deal with that before they could deal with anything else.
The moral is, make sure that you make your points pre surgery, and make sure
that they are really listening!
And best of luck to all who venture out this way. I don’t regret it for a
single minute!!!
Marilyn
239/200 (as of this morning!)
Open RNY 3/4/2002