I did it! I had my Gastric Sleeve surgery this past Thursday. I can't believe the time has already come and gone. It seems like just yesterday when I decided to change surgeons and my surgery date was put off for another month.

The first thing I want to address is "the pain!" I do not recall reading anything about how bad the pain can be and let me tell you I had some excruciating pain.

I've also learned a lesson from this that I wish I had known going into this that might have stopped me from having an unnecessary EKG.

Now back to the beginning. The surgery went well. I was all afraid of complications especially since I was a self-pay patient but as far as I know and have been able to learn, there was nothing extra, that is unless they charge me for the extra EKG.

What caused the extra EKG was my lack of knowledge in how to describe the pain I was having in my esophagus after surgery. I kept calling it chest pain because it was right in the middle of my chest. Come to find out, I should have said it was in my esophagus and it was only the air and gas from the surgery that was bothering me so much.

I did learn thanks to you guys on here that the best way to resolve that issue was to walk and walk and walk. That was the only time that I did not feel anything in my chest aka esophagus.

While that wasn't the worse pain, it did scare me because I was worried about my heart. Turned out, I didn't need to worry at all.

The day after surgery, I wanted to take a shower to get all of the glue off of me from the EKGs and I wanted to get dressed because I was expecting to go home when I think I pushed myself too much. It was after that when I started getting excrutiating pain in one of my bolos (?). It was the one that is the most prominent with an indention in it.

One of the nurses described it as a knife being pushed in to your body and I have to say that I agree. It was horrendous. Fortunately, it did not last long but just a few seconds at a time.

That's when I started begging for more pain killers.

They didn't completely start working for a couple of hours but when they did it was a great relief. I wasn't in pain the total time but I had to be real careful how I moved or the sharp pain would come.

I have continued to take these strong pain killers ever since but have not had that same level of pain since that day after surgery. So I'm begnning to think I can stop these pretty soon.

I was told my 3rd day would be my worst. I was not counting the initial day of surgery on Thursday and thought that meant today but everyone else was telling me no that meant yesterday. Either way, I'm afraid of jinxing myself but I'm doing great! Thank you Jesus.

I had so many blessings during all of this that when I first wrote my thank you email to my sisters for coming to be with me on that day and to the ones that couldn't make it for their prayers, I was surprised when I told my story by all the things that went right.

Since this blog entry is titled The Pain, I'm going to do a separate one talking about all of my blessings. Let's just say while I did have those moments of regret the day after surgery when I was in such pain, right now I am so excited about what is to come I can hardly wait for the future.