 Today's video is sponsored by Squarespace. Hello there, my beautiful, lovely internet friends. Welcome to my surgical recovery nest. We've got pickles the teddy bear. We've got a heating pad. We've got ice packs right over there and way too many blankets and pillows. So five days ago I had a laparoscopy surgery which is basically something that they can do to look in your abdomen and figure out what's going on. Specifically, they were looking for signs of endometriosis to go in and remove if it was present and I'd like to give you an update on how all of that went. It was definitely an interesting surgery with some weird after-surgery side effects which I had not experienced previously and let you guys know how things went. Now I do want to start this with a bit of a disclaimer. Today is my first day off of any post-op pain medications. I did try filming this video yesterday. I went in the morning of Wednesday. Oh God, my head's a little foggy. Nope, okay. It just did not go well, I'll leave it at that. I kept trying to say words and then the wrong words would come out and I was like, oh, okay. I guess medications do affect me. So in my three decades here on planet earth, I have had well over a dozen surgeries. I'm pretty familiar with how the whole process goes and I also have a lot of negative experiences in our medical healthcare system. So when I go in for surgery, it's the last thing that I want to do and it's also something that I have a lot of anxiety about because I don't want any more medically traumatic situations and I just want to start off by saying that this was with a new hospital system in my area and they were absolutely freaking fantastic. This is probably the best surgical experience I had start to finish and also the best recovery that I've had so far, which comes down to a number of things that I'll be talking about here shortly. But a big thank you to Penrose, St. Francis for treating me like a human being, which was absolutely lovely. So I went in for surgery Wednesday morning. Oh, I just spilled my tea. We all knew that was gonna happen. I talked about this a little bit in my previous video as I was going into surgery, but the reason that I was having this exploratory laparoscopy, which is a fun word to say, was that they suspected that I had endometriosis. Now this is something I've had the symptoms of for many years. I've thought I probably had it, but there's no way to confirm it without actually going in and visually seeing if it's there or not. So it's really kind of like a 50-50 shot, whether this is causing your symptoms or it's something else. I understood going in that there was a significant chance that they weren't gonna find anything. I was really hopeful that maybe they would find something so I would have an answer and kind of a solution to what was going on. And though I am not looking to collect any more scars on my body after weighing some of the risks and the benefits, I did decide with my husband to go ahead and do the surgery in hopes that maybe there would be an answer there so that I would know what was going on and we could move forward with better treatment. Unfortunately, as my doctor told me in post-op, the good news is the bad news. I do not have endometriosis. They found no signs of that, which on the one hand is freaking fantastic because it is a horrible disease to have to deal with. It's a lifelong thing. But on the other hand, it still means that there's no real answer or solution. It's very probable that a lot of this just comes back to fibromyalgia. A lot of people with fibromyalgia deal with pelvic pain. Oftentimes it's unexplainable, right? It doesn't show up on any scans. It's just something that you kind of deal with. So that's kind of the current theory, but it's hard to be experiencing symptoms that don't have a name or don't have some kind of solution. So I'm guessing I probably will be following up with some GI and urinary doctors in the future just to confirm that there's nothing that's wrong, right? Outside of fibromyalgia because I feel like that's probably a beneficial thing to do. And because I've seen so many doctors this year are out-of-pocket expenses are met. So yeah, insurance, it's basically free for the rest of the year. The weird thing is that we celebrate with healthcare in America, am I right? It's been so expensive already that it's not gonna be more expensive. Oh, okay, all right. I should not be trusted. You know, I did say I was off while post-surgery medications because I am, but I'm pretty sure I'm still experiencing some of the effects. So one of the bizarre things that they do during a laparoscopy is they make an incision below your belly button and another incision or two down below that and they fill your abdomen with carbon dioxide gas. Basically, this kind of inflates your body so that they're able to clearly see things when they're going in there with cameras and scopes. I don't know, how did someone figure this out? That's my question. However, one of the side effects is that that gas does not just magically disappear in your system the second they're done with surgery. It lodges in there. And the first 48 hours after surgery were very uncomfortable because you can feel it. You can feel that in your body. Oftentimes it kind of travels upwards. You can feel so much pressure and tightness in your diaphragm. I was having a lot of trouble breathing. Like I could breathe, but it was just painful and difficult. A lot of very intense shoulder and upper body pain as that kind of dissipated. The number one thing that helps that break up is the one thing you don't wanna be doing which is moving around. So I tried to be a really good patient. I spent a lot of time just pacing back and forth in my living room, trying to get that to break up in between laying down and sleeping it off. But for me also, my body was just like so stretched and bloated and expanded. I had trouble eating for days because I felt like if I put anything else in my body my stomach would literally like just like burst open. You're just so, so swollen and full. But like I said, thankfully at about 72 hours that kind of dissipated fully for me. And I was just dealing with normal after-surgery effects. I do have some issues with anesthesia that it just kind of stays in my system for a few days. It takes me a while to start feeling kind of human again and where I don't have to sleep a lot of the times. So by yesterday I was really just dealing with like the abdominal pain, the incision pain, kind of post-surgical pain. You do get some bruising. I'm gonna pop a picture up on screen of one of the incisions and bruises. If you don't wanna see this just skip ahead about 10 seconds. But this is what that was looking like yesterday. I actually didn't realize the incisions were gonna be quite so big. They're like an inch and an inch and a half across. I usually don't care that much about scars but I was kind of like, ah, bummer. I thought they were gonna just be little like buttonholes for the cameras but alas, they are not. Like I said, I'm not a newcomer to surgery. But one thing that has been very different about this surgical journey and something I would highly recommend to anyone going through any kind of illness or surgical procedure is every surgery I've ever had in the past when I've had to rest afterwards. Like it's important that you actually give your body what it needs, whether that be rest, good food, sleep, a little bit of movement. I've always felt so much guilt for that because I feel like if I'm resting and not being productive, whether that's doing some tasks or responding to emails or whatever it is that I'm failing to a lot of guilt and a lot of worthlessness recovering from surgery because I don't feel like I'm contributing to society. And I think that's one of those lies that's been lodged pretty deep in me. Like hustle, do more, be better. And you can't really do that when you're recovering. You need to give your body what it needs and so that's a mindset I've been working on breaking down for years now. And I feel like this is the first surgery where I was able to be like, you know what? Everything will be waiting for me when my body is okay again. I don't need to push myself. I don't need to break my body. I don't need to prove anything to myself or anybody else. And so I am going to take this time to fully listen to my body, to rest, to relax and to not make myself feel like shit about that. To not make myself feel awful about the fact that I just had surgery and I am recovering. And genuinely this surgical recovery has gone better than any other. Like there was discomfort, there was pain, but I was okay. Like I was just, I was okay because I wasn't stressing myself out and making all those symptoms worse by being like, you need to do more. Because there are times when you don't need to do more. When what you need to be doing is listening to your body and resting. And so by doing that for the first four or five days, I feel exponentially better than I ever have this far out after any surgical procedure, which is pretty fantastic. But another interesting discovery from this surgery was the fact that drugs work again. So many of you guys know this piece of my story, but I was on pain management medication for almost a decade. Meaning that I was on larger and larger doses of narcotics, of opioids. My system became very, very accustomed to that. Meaning that getting any kind of pain relief if something bad did happen was really difficult to do. And while I'm sure some of that's probably still in my system, using kind of the normal amount of pain medication after this procedure as any other person was sufficient. That was honestly another big win for me because it can be kind of scary knowing that if you ever get in very intense pain, if you're in an accident or something bad happens, it's gonna be damn near impossible to get your pain under control because the amount of medication your body's gonna need to feel that relief is really high and sometimes dangerous levels of high so you won't be able to get help if you need it. And that was something I was always really worried about and I'm really grateful to know that that has resolved itself, right? Like I was able to get through this just fine. So at the end of the day, this was another door that didn't really lead anywhere, right? Like there's a part of me that's like, great. You went through more havoc on your body for no good reason because they didn't find anything. But realistically, I know that a possibility was eliminated that we know it's not something. And I've spent a lot of time over the last many years being so unbelievably frustrated at not knowing what was going on with my body in a variety of ways and not having an answer to what is giving you pain, not having a community or a word to describe it can feel very isolating and lonely and frustrating. But going into this, knowing that there was a very real possibility that I still wouldn't have any answers, I'd try to prepare myself for that and be like, you know what, this is just how things are right now. I'm gonna do what I need to do to continue to make sure that it's nothing more serious, right? To kind of eliminate any bad possibilities but at the end of the day, this is my life right now. At the end of the day, I have some answers. There are some answers that are still being looked for and I'm trying to just make peace with that and not let it completely consume my mind because it has definitely done that in the past and it is an agonizing place to be when we're so desperate. This time around, I feel like I've done an okay job at just kind of breathing through it and accepting things as they come. So all in all, I'm glad that this went smoothly. I'm glad that it's behind me. I'm bummed that there aren't any answers just yet. And I'm really, really grateful for all of your lovely messages and comments and support. Thank you so much. I really hope this is gonna be like the last surgery possibly ever. I always say that and it never works out. So maybe I don't even wish that this time. Maybe I'm just like the last one for a very long time. With that being said, real quick before we finish up and go, I wanna give a big shout out to my sponsor, Squarespace. This is a fantastic company that gives you domain names and websites and all kinds of fantastic tools that I've been working with for a couple months now. And I highly recommend them if you're looking for a domain name, a website, if you're building a store, if you're looking for a personal website. As you guys know, recently I've been working on redesigning my public speaking website and Squarespace is all of the features that I need from easy domain purchase to fantastic analytics, blogging and commenting features that are so simple to use. Also perhaps most important to me and many of us really easy website design, building tools, gorgeous, easy to edit templates so you can build out your website from some existing design so you don't have to build it from scratch. And more. And best of all, my friends at Squarespace have offered a 10% discount to anyone who goes to squarespace.com slash Footless Joe. So go ahead and click that link in my description if you're interested in a discount on a fantastic service. A big thank you to my dad for being there to bring me to and pick me up and sit with me through a lot of nausea after surgery and also to Brian for bringing me home and taking such amazing care of me. When you have any kind of abdominal surgery, sitting up becomes very difficult. Like I'm just at the point now where I can like do this motion without significant pain. It's just like kind of normal soreness. So he did a lot of running to get me water upstairs and I didn't want to get up to put my leg on and things of that nature. So thank you baby, I really appreciate it. He also brought me the world's best gummy bears. If you're looking for fantastic gummy bears, not remotely sponsored, these are where it's at. Am I eating gummy bears at nine in the morning? Yes, yes I am. And with that being said to my patrons, a big thank you as well for seeing me through this time for your generosity and your continued support. I really appreciate it. To you watching this video right now, thank you so much for spending a few minutes out of your day. Here with me today, a little bit out of it. Like I'm getting back with it but I'm still a little bit out of it as you might be able to tell you could be anywhere else in the world doing anything else. And you chose to hang out with me for a few minutes and I really appreciate that. I love you guys, I'm thinking about you and I'll see you in the next video. Bye guys, bye. So soft and fuzzy. Bye guys.