Pain after surgery

I thought I’d talk a little about the pain I experienced after surgery.

For the first two days, when I was still in hospital, I was in a lot of pain – particularly on my left hand side, which was the side (my surgeon explained to me) where most of the “work” was done during my bypass. Apparently there was a deep stitch in my muscle on that side, and that was the cause of a lot of the pain.

During these two days I couldn’t get enough pain medication inside of me. I must have been asking the nurses for drugs quite regularly, as they kept saying they couldn’t give me anything else for an hour or two. At the time I was rating the pain at about 7 or 8 out of ten.

Upon discharge from hospital I had a presription for Solpadeine Max, which is a combination of paracetemol and codeine. And for the next two days, I took three doses of them a day. During that time the rating for pain was more like 2 or 3 out of ten.

And then after that, I didn’t feel like I needed any more pain relief, so I stopped taking the drugs.

In total I only had pain for 4 days. After that I still had some discomfort when bending over to trying to lie on my side, but even that has continued to diminish over time, so that today – 12 days on – I don’t feel any discomfort at all.

A few days ago – on day 9 after surgery – I also got to take off the dressing on my surgical wounds, and they’re all fine and healing well. There were 5 incisions for the lapracopic surgery, but they’re all quite small – varying from 1cm to 2cm long.

The wounds aren’t sentitive at all, and don’t hurt if I touch them.

All in all, I was surprised at how quickly the pain went. I was expecting to be taking the pain medication for a couple of weeks.