[embodiment] some post-surgical notes

[kaberett]

Apparently I'm not writing up a detailed version of this, so in brief...

The biggest difference to my daily life is my chronic intractable constipation has resolved. No matter how good I was about hydration and fibre and movement, I was almost always at Bristol Stool Scale 1 and sometimes 2, while taking an osmotic laxative every day. I have basically just... stopped... consuming the misery beverage. At all. It is such a relief.

I had a couple of periods of worse pain, presumably while my abdominal nerves were going WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK, but that's settled back down.

I am not loving the change in the consistency of my periods -- I am finding that I now get an unpleasant leaky dribble of low-viscosity blood-stained Gunk that makes its way around the edges of the menstrual cup and onto whatever clothes I'm wearing, so the period pants I got for immediate post-surgical use are still in regular rotation.

In terms of Pilates: I am not back to doing everything that I was doing pre-surgery (either in terms of individual-exercises-at-all, or how far I've progressed the ones I am doing), but this is in part because (as Sarah Russell cheerfully predicted) I am in fact relearning a bunch of underlying principles of movement, so I'm doing what I am doing significantly better in terms of form, muscle activation, etc than I was managing with more "advanced" progressions pre-surgery. (With the possible exception of Rolling Like A Ball, which I am plausibly doing as well as I ever have.) I am also still doing Bonus Extra Hip Flexor Nonsense in my warm-up. I... am not going to try continuing to expand beyond the Essentials sequence to the Beginners sequence until I'm more solid both on actually managing to get on the mat for a full sequence more frequently (I am not yet back up to a reliable 3x a week, though I am more-or-less managing my bare minimum "get on the mat for ten fifteen breaths"; increasing the duration of a Full Sequence correspondingly increases the activation energy to getting on the mat) and on the movements I'm currently doing (work in progress!).

I am still, multiple times a week, basking in no longer having ureteral stents in.