Day 6 post-surgery for round 1 (eye lift, cheek , jaw reshaping, under neck lipo, cheek lipo, neck and face lift — required when one does jaw work).
The right side feels like most of the swelling is gone, except for around the corner of my mouth, which you can’t really see in the photo. It feels weird though, the skin is extremely tight, although that’s to be expected after a facelift. But it gets easier and easier to open my mouth, which in turn makes it easier to eat.
Left side continues to be more swollen. It doesn’t seem like it’s coming down, but when I compared to yesterday’s photo, I can tell it is.
Yellow bruising around the sides of the mouth seems to mostly gone, although there’s still spots of deeper-colored bruising.
Healing of the under-eye bruising seems to have slowed down, I can’t tell as much of a difference from yesterday. But the doctor is coming in about an hour to do a follow-up exam and remove the stitches from my eyelids, so at least my eyes will look better (I’m not wearing eye liner, the dark dotted lines are the stitches.)
Doctor came for a follow-up exam. Said I was healing well, but gave a prescription for a drug that’s supposed to boost my red cell count, which is low. That would explain the strong cravings I’ve been having for red meat.
He didn’t remove the eyelid stitches after all. There’s still a bit of tension, and since I’m having surgery again, they might as well remove them while I’m under. Not heartbroken because having stitches removed isn’t fun, and having them removed from my eyelids seemed like it would be particularly unpleasant.
Definitely learned a lesson today about not pushing too hard post-surgery.
Went to take a nap before going to the pharmacy and crashed out hard for three hours. I’d still be asleep if I hadn’t set the alarm to be sure I got out around sunset, just in case. I’d love to continue sleeping, but that would really screw up my body clock.
A wise friend had reminded me “you don’t heal fast, you just have reserves” — and to be wary of pushing yourself too hard and running out, because you’ll crash extremely fast.
Case proved. I only got five hours sleep last night, and today was the most strenuous post-surgery outing to date. Probably a good hour’s worth of walking, albeit broken up by stops along the way. Part of it was due to probably not eating quite enough either, I had fish for lunch at the Japanese garden, and the lighter meal with a nice change of pace, from Argentine cuisine, which tends to be on the heavy side. But didn’t have the sort of afternoon snack that I needed to compensate, since I was waiting for the doctor and didn’t want to eat in case he examine the stitches in my mouth.
Anyway, lesson learned. I’ll have a little pre-dinner snack to make sure I’ve got some energy, and then dinner tonight will be the restaurant that’s just a block away.