June 2nd, 2010
Well I had the orchiectomy on May 20th. Everything went well, although it did take me an extra hour to fully awaken. Liz(Kim aka my wife), was stuck in the waiting room for 3 hours, 1 hour surgery 2 hour wake up time. They told her in the beginning someone will come get her when I’m out but no one did. Kinda lame. When I could finally get up and into a wheel chair they wheeled me out to her and I remember how happy she was to finally see me.
So they didn’t prescribe me any anti-nausea medicine, and taking the lortab didn’t help relieve any pain and made me so nauseas that I felt even worse with pain. So I stopped taking it because I have an appointment on the 21st which was originally scheduled for the checkup for after I would have been with antibiotics BUT I figured I’d use it to get some new pain med’s. So I got some anti-nausea, percocet and morphine. YEY. Morphine didn’t help that much, made me feel extremely weird so I stuck to the percocet. That was my life savor right there.
I was walked just in a couple of days, but not much. By Monday I was doing well enough to grab my books and go to school. That week took me a while to walk to class, probably double the time but I did it. I had mostly winged my self off the pain meds at this point but occasionally had a foggy head and couldn’t concentrate that well in class, but other than that it wasn’t too bad.
I believe I remember calling the VA nurse line on May 25th to see if my pathology results had come back, and they did! That was quick considering I was told it would be 5-7 days. The nurse said she would contact the urologist who ordered to call me to explain the results. Never happened. Later that week, on Thursday, I started having a lot of pain. I found the source to be this “stump” i felt in my scrotum. Called the VA, explained what was going on because I thought that it might be a hernia. Urologist calls me back and quickly dismisses it. This is great except i felt like he thought that it was a pointless call and he was real quick to dismiss everything i said or tried to explain what it felt like. He then offered to tell me my pathology reports just as i was about to ask. YEY!
He told me that I have 70% seminoma and 30% non-seminoma(Embryonal Carcinoma). He also said we will need to talk about sperm banking and lymph node dissection. After a bit of research I found that the lymph node dissection is called RPLND. It doesn’t sound like fun, but then again none of this is.
Last few weeks have been mentally hard on me. It’s hard to focus on the good instead of the bad because it seems there is just so much more bad than good. I know that it could be worse but trying to imagine that reality is hard for me right now. My next appointment is the 7th of June. I should find out a bit more about the pathology results then.
