A Small Surgery

There are moments in your life when your health throws a curve ball at you. It happened to me several years ago and the end result is now on display.

I'm at home, recovering from a surgery. I've been at home for almost 4 weeks and I still have at least 2 more to go before I'm considered able to go to back to work.

Although the surgery was nothing too complicated this is my second day almost completely out of bed. I'm now able to sit for small burst of time. For the rest of the time I either stand up and walk or I simply go back to bed.

I'm lucky. The day after my surgery, the doctor talked to me. I said it clearly: "Only 50 to 60% of these cases don't recover like we would like them to. When they don't recover in the 2 to 3 weeks like we like them to, then the scale is in the order of months. Minimum 2 to 3 months." That scared my, but I was confident because the doctor said that "90% of the success depends on the patient. If you stick to a few simples rules all should go well." Even with such a bad numbers I decided I could do it, but then I met the nurse.

I was released from the hospital the day after I was admitted, 20 hours after I had my surgery. Two days later the nurse came to my parents house to check on me and make the necessary treatments. What she told me left me baffled. She said that 90% of the cases where the doctors chose the approach that was applied on me didn't succeed. That "people simple don't recover as
they should e 2 to 3 weeks and then is more like 4 to 6 months". After talking a bit more she finally said she had "never saw a case where it went well." This was mind blowing, but still it didn't made me give up just yet.

I new the changes were slim to none, but I had one advantage: my motivation, I simply just wanted to go back to sports as soon as possible, and my diet.

One advantage of having gone through a diet and being dead close to the ideal weight for my height is that I don't have as many fat matter as I used to have in the region of the surgery. In fact, I have almost no fat matter in that area, just muscles. This meant that the stitches applied had a better chance of keeping together then all the people that have a lot of fat in that area.

The end result is that after 12 days they removed all the stitches, and 23 days after the surgery I was finally able to sitting down at my computer and type a few lines of source code. I still have a couple of weeks to go before I'm able to go to work. My doctor says, and with a good point, that it makes no sense for me to go to work if I can't sit for long periods in front of the computer.

If there is a lesson to be learnt from all this, assuming that things won't go terribly wrong in the mean time, is that you should do what the doctor says and no matter the odds you should always focus on your goal and simply believe that you will achieve it no matter the odds.

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