Obviously, I've been away....

For those not in the know, this summer, for me, has been a summer from Hell. On June 15th I underwent surgery to repair an incisional hernia for the second time. I developed the hernia along the line of an incision from a surgery in the early '90's that became so badly infected that it caused damage to the abdominal wall. The repair for this surgery failed and I had to have it done again. The surgery took almost six hours. I expected a long and slow recovery, but nothing quite as slow as my experience this summer. Here it is the middle of August and I still feel like a bag of broken glass every time I sneeze. A CAT scan in July showed the development of a large seroma, a collection of fluid that was possibly putting pressure on the repair, and I went back to the hospital to have it drained. While I did experience some relief from this "tweaking" of the surgery, it was a lot less relief than I had hoped to get. I'm still pretty miserable a lot of the time, and I can't lift any more than a few pounds, nor can I expect to for quite some time yet. Sometimes, I have trouble even sitting at the keyboard without pain, all of which is why I haven't been checking in here for the past nine days. I hope to do better!