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For her seventh video blog we rejoin Roberta ten days after her muscle repair / abdominoplasty surgery at The Avoca Clinic. Roberta has had her second drain removed and she updates on how she is progressing in her recovery.

Video Transcript

Hi everyone and welcome to my seventh blog for The Avoca Clinic. So today I am ten days post-op, feeling a lot more like myself because I got my second drain removed yesterday. So I went into the clinic and the nurse saw me very quickly, I was probably only waiting in the waiting room five minutes, and she brought me in and I lay down on the bed, an it was over before I knew it.

“it’s always been very reassuring and I just feel very confident in their care”

I’d be lying if I said it was a walk in the park, it was pretty sore second time round, but once it was done it was done. Like an injection, a little bit sore but fine. The nurse was just so nice and friendly, also professional but you know, she was telling me how good the results were and if I needed anything just to give them a call. So, very reassuring every time I’ve gone to the clinic for my follow up appointments, it’s always been very reassuring and I just feel very confident in their care. It’s great that it’s only just up the road from me as well.

In terms of sleep I’m still sleeping upright on the couch, still not in my bed so I look forward to being able to lie flat but for the moment I still have my triangle wedge pillow that I think I showed you in the first or second blog. That’s been really useful so I definitely encourage you to have a look at different pillow options for sleeping upright. Actually the leg pillow which I got as well which is a kind of memory foam pillow – I’ve been using every night as well. I found that with two normal pillows on top of each other it wasn’t giving my legs the support they needed and it meant that my stomach was kind of taking it.

“It feels great to have that support over the wound”

I’m walking a lot less hunched over today and yesterday. I also have a binder on except for at night time which is on the tightest one at the moment. So it actually feels great to have that support over the wound. I was also able to have a shower this morning after getting the drains removed yesterday so it feels amazing to have washed my hair and the dressing that they left me with yesterday is waterproof as well. It’s a special bandage called Opsite so it’s going all the way across the wound, my belly button and the draining sites as well so it meant I was able to hop in the shower and it didn’t matter if any of that got wet because I was able to dab it off with the towel and it’s still totally dry. The clinic were really good, they gave me spare bandages just in case any of it lifts up so that I can re-apply it myself and I was shown how to do that so that was very comforting.

I’m still not able to lift anything or do housework which is fine – I’m having lots of help this week so I’m just taking it easy, lots of couch time, lots of telly, lots of books. I’ll be going back to The Avoca Clinic in a week to meet with the surgeon again just to let him see how everything has heeled and to advise me what the next steps are in terms of my recovery. I would imagine I’ll keep wearing my compression stockings which are not that great considering it’s very hot out today with the mini heatwave for the leaving cert coming up! I’ll probably be told to keep the binder on for a few weeks as well.

So thanks for tuning in, if you have any questions please let me know and I’ll talk to you in a couple of days time. Thanks for watching – bye!