Now on a sunny blue sky with a 78F high expected later Monday May 5, 2025, I'm into my day 4 of surgery recovery. My recovery this first week continues to be slow, uneven, uncomfortable. However am out of significant mortal dangers versus last Thursday afternoon when I was wheeled on a patient transport cart into the Kaiser Permanente Hospital operating room. My 76 year old life's first major surgery experience. My immune system knocked out the foul gastroenteritis virus I obviously picked up at the hospital in less than a day so can eat more normally now.
I have a large bandaged, angled, 5 inch incision in my left groin with much as yet unviewable stitching both on my skin surface as well as below attaching gut membranes and ligaments to synthetic mesh implants. The doctor's long impressive technical report of what they performed and saw is surprisingly detailed with medical terminology I will at some time analyze to understand.
Laying or sitting still has little sensation but movement like rising from a chair and moving, I can feel small areas of stitching monofilament pain that will take time to heal and recede. Even sitting up from say a prone bed position must be done slowly, gingerly.
Fortunately, as a retired senior that prepared my residence beforehand, I don't need to return to employment, drive my car elsewhere, meet with any others, or engage in any activity outside my older two story residence. And that includes enough food to last until I drive in maybe a week. I could drive briefly now if necessary, but will not. Each day, I'll walk outside briefly to fetch my postal mail.
A major unexpected debacle has however made my recovery period very different than what I had expected and the main reason for of noting such in seniorforums dot com as it will impact my activity herein. Two years ago my old 2003 era HP Windows desktop motherboard with all my graphic software, power supply function failed in a way I would not be able to repair by merely replacing the power supply module. Now collecting dust. Was able to move Photoshop and other key software to my expensive powerful 2014 Dell XPS-15 laptop and run from there.
But prior to driving to the hospital Thursday, Windows 10 was apparently secretly trying to install one of their hidden from user awareness updates. Not having time to wait for whatever that was to complete after running Shutdown, with the power on button forced a shutdown that corrupted key boot files. The last couple days twice ran from a command prompt chkdsk /f that shows uncorrectable attributes file errors putting the drive into a stuck write protect mode. Although most of my important personal files are safe on two other external 4tb drives, the graphic apps like Photoshop are not.
Thus now need to wait till I am recovered from surgery enough to visit a PC repair service where they have special programs capable of rebuilding the corrupted file structures. If that doesn't work will run a low level format then rebuild, installing Windows and all. Or buy a new desktop.
In the mean time for web use, am using my old moto g6 Android phone and as I type, a cheap slow $220 Windows 11 pc laptop I bought last year for travel and possible situations like this. It uses a touchpad I dislike versus computer mouse and lacks many programs I had on the Dell. So yeah, am here but hobbled. Since I can't do much real computer work else anyway, will probably spend more time at this board than expected.
My Dell with a 24" 4k UHD external monitor was downstairs on a fancy multi level mobile computer cart in my living room where I could watch TV at the same time. Instead my new "headquarters" will be upstairs atop a king size floor mattress in my southwest bedroom next to a large window with good light to the west. Per doctor instructions, am drinking a lot more fluids than usual. With my adjacent bathroom, don't need to walk up and down stairs. So have lots of items on the floor next to me I can easily grab. Just made 8oz of a Trader Joe's vegetable fried rice package for lunch.
