Saturday, July 28, 2012

the to-do list

Now that vacation is over, all of my attention is focused on my upcoming surgery (next Friday, 8/3). Because I am a control freak through and through, I am keeping myself quite busy (mentally, anyway) with a self-imposed "to-do before surgery" list. Let's take a look at what all I have on the week's agenda, shall we?

1. Find out everything imaginable about what to expect during/after surgery from tell-all bloggers. This is actually proving to be extremely enlightening and useful, as the information the actual DOCTORS give me is...lacking, to say the least. My hat's off to the girls willing to over-share EVERYTHING about their own experiences with this surgery...I feel like I'm a lot more aware of what to expect (and worry about) because of their openness...and I certainly plan to pay it forward by doing the same thing after my surgery is over. Here's a few of the helpful blogs I've come across: SIF's Post-Op TipsLap for Endo Diagnosis & Treatment Advice; Anne's Lap Tips; Lap: Before & After Tips; My Lap to treat Endo.

Now that I know what to expect, I have to follow the advice of these ladies and make lots of preparations, which brings me to the rest of my to-do list.

2. Prepare and freeze meals. I've been prepping and shopping and planning to do this for a few weeks now, but now that the time has come to actually cook and freeze...ugh. Who wants to do all THAT work? But it needs to be done, so I shall do it. Eventually. Maybe later. (Or not-- my parents are going to come stay with me for the weekend after surgery and Mom said something about cooking a bunch of stuff for us...so maybe I will do NO preparations, and leave that to her? Yes?)

3. Collect proper entertainment/things to pass the time. I've read almost all the books I have on my Kindle, so I need to find new stuff to download. I think I'll go to the library, too. As for TV-based entertainment, I think the Olympics will keep me pretty occupied. I was also thinking about grabbing a season or 2 of a good show to start watching...we don't have Netflix, but if anyone already owns DVDs of a great show and wants to lend them to me, that would be totally accepted. Ditto goes for good books you're dying to lend.


4. Clean the house. I am TERRIBLE at the 'lay there and heal' thing (remember, I had over a week of this in April after that episode, plus many smaller (one or 2 day) experiences over the past few years after regular ruptured cysts), and nothing will get me hopping (however painfully) off my couch/bed faster than spying dog fur tumbleweeds rolling across the floor, or a layer of dust on the mantel, or spaghetti-sauce-stains on the stovetop, or grass flecks on the rug. Although I (and my house) am normally quite orderly and clean, apparently the desire for cleanliness goes into MAJOR OVERDRIVE the longer I am laying on a couch with nothing to do but look for imperfections in my environment. Thus, I must preempt this desire to clean by making sure everything is SUPER CLEAN before the surgery. The good thing is that I did some major deep cleaning last week before vacation, so there isn't THAT much to do now.


5. Weed the gardens. REALLY WELL. Let's be honest-- they haven't been weeded in far too long anyway (before vacation, we were getting rain almost every single evening, so I could never do anything outside)...so the lack of weeding PLUS abundance of rain (totally unheard of, btw) means that the weeds are mile-high. This is the sort of thing that will majorly stress me out as I'm bed-bound, and give me constant temptation to run outside and fix things up. And I have a hunch that the physical stress of weeding (bending over, pulling, etc) is NOT going to feel awesome after abdominal surgery, so...yup, time to take care of that now. Yesterday I knocked out two beds really well. Only about a million to go...


6. Find a multi-outlet extension cord thingy. The couch I prefer to lay on is in the middle of the room with no outlets nearby. This will cramp my style and limit my electronic-device-using. I know we have several of these things around the house...just need to find one that can be temporarily (and tackily...haha, it's going to be laying across the middle of the floor, sick!) relocated.



Okay. I think that's everything on the list for now. Now that you see how much I have to do (as well as full-time work all week, of course, in addition to another trip to Atlanta on Wednesday for pre-op), it should make sense that instead of doing ANY of those things right now, I've spent the morning making and eating pancakes and watching the Olympics. Obviously.


How about a few random vacation pics before you go? Perfect.


 Most scenic (and RIDICULOUS) mini-golf course ever!! Plus it was SO WINDY the balls kept getting blown away, ha. But I beat Matt anyway, so that's all that mattered.


 This was an AWESOME giant swing in the lobby. Seriously, it was the coolest thing ever. I want one in my house. Add it to my list!

9 comments:

  1. I can totally relate to #4, and in fact, I just finished cleaning the whole house in anticipation of my (hopefully) upcoming bed rest! Great minds...

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  2. Going to the library and getting books to read was a good decision for me during my recovery from surgery. Of course, some of the books I chose were terrible, but it gave me something to do.

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  3. There is no better time to start reading Harry Potter. Seriously. Just do it. You won't regret it.

    And if you agree to try HP, I will let you borrow whatever DVDs you want. As far as tv goes, we have Friends (duh, but sometimes mindless tv was all I could take when I was recovering from surgery), Good Eats, and Lost. Also, Vision Video has a lot of tv shows and they're cheap to rent.

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  4. I totally hear you on the needing to have everything cleaned/weeded/etc so that you can recuperate. I would feel the same way.

    I don't have any stellar ideas except READ HARRY POTTER if you haven't already, as the commenter above me said. It's good. It's mindless. It's long enough to keep you going. And (except for parts of book five) it's very entertaining.

    And get fun snacks if you can. I always like having special treats to eat when I'm spending hours lying on the couch.

    Praying all goes well for you.

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  5. Totally agree with Mollyanne. I didn't ready Harry Potter till after college a couple years and I couldn't put them down.

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  6. You will do great!

    I was the SAME way prior to my bed rest from IVF! I had the entire house spotless because I knew it would drive me insane just laying and staring at everything that "needed cleaning."

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  7. Can you email me your address? I think I want to send you a little package!

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  8. I totally have books you can read! The Kristen Heitzmann series we had talked about! Any chance Ian would know where to find you this week?

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I love comments almost as much as I love Mexican food. Seriously.