Post #5 - 18 Nov 2020 - Day 8 post surgery, heparin & pain relief

Yesterday was a week ago since the surgery and given the decrease in pain since then and the amount of laying down I've done it seems like much longer than that. I'm still not weight-bearing at all on the foot and certainly won't until the stitches come out in another week, and even then it might take longer than that. Starting to get uncomfortable sitting or laying down so much, and I can still feel I benefit from having my foot up rather than down.

Normally with either surgery, especially with the bunion you can bear weight on another part of your foot. The forefoot is very much in recovery and I mustn't put the weight through the heel as any tension placed on the Achilles could set me back.

Yesterday was the last day of the daily heparin injections in the abs. Basically involves pinching some fat on alternating sides of the belly button. Pulling off the sheath, inserting the needle and pushing the plunger until a click, whereby the needle retracts. I HATE doing it given I hate needles but its gotten easier. Having not very much fat I'm not sure if this hinders me and causes more pain. The main thing I've learnt is doing it slowly and not tensing, so it hurts less on delivery and afterwards. Just has taken me 7 days to work this out (and not faint) ! Check out this video for a demo of me taking it.

As for other drugs, I plotted a graph of how much per day of the various pain relief drugs I'd taken. The y-axis is log scale and the medications are in different unit scales (mg's vs g's). The strongest pain relief was the Ora-morph which was 0.5mg/mL with a max dose of 120mg per day. The most I took was on day 2 with 35mg and probably was the sorest day, where the most I ever took was 5mg every 4 hours (2.5mL) - which as I mention in an earlier post make sure you follow with some water to make sure that 1/2 tsp actually reaches your stomach! Given the addictiveness of the morphine I aimed to keep the co-codamol at the highest dose and lower the ora-morphine before lowering the co-codamol. Today (day 8) I've not needed to take anything.