My Gut Knows

As soon as my boyfriend and I got back from dinner I asked him to check the wound to see if it was okay. I also asked him to take a picture of it so that I could see it as well. When he saw it he said that it 'looked okay'. When he showed me the picture, my opinion was drastically different. Instead of seeing scar tissue as I had seen after my appointment with my surgeon, I saw that it had opened. It was not the entire wound that opened but the part that had was enough to completely freak me out. 

My boyfriend tried to calm me down and get me to realize that the open part was very tiny and would most likely be okay soon. His saying that got him absolutely nowhere. I was already way too emotional to listen to reason. My boyfriend knows that when I am that upset, the best thing to do is to stop trying to get through to me because it isn't going to work anyway. He went home after suggesting that I try to go to sleep.  I did attempt to sleep that night but was completely unsuccessful. I could not get myself to calm down in the least, regardless of the fact that I knew the visiting nurse that I completely trusted and had become very close with was going to come the following day. 

She called me the next morning and was walking into my room about an hour after we hung up. When she came in she instantly said 'uh oh, what's wrong'? That was based on the look on my face. I explained to her the way I had felt at dinner and what I had seen in the pictures my boyfriend had taken. When she looked at the wound, she did not say a word. After knowing her for two and a half years, I had figured out that her being silent could not mean anything good. I asked her what had happened and she said that yes it was opened but that I shouldn't really freak out. We called and left a message for my surgeon to call her so that she could tell him what was going on. In the meantime she covered the wound with a dry dressing and told me that she would call me once she had spoken to my surgeon. 

As promised, she called me back a few hours later to tell me what my surgeon said about the situation. She told me that he had said her covering it the way she did was absolutely fine and that I was still able to take showers. I was surprised  he had said that I was able to do that being that it had apparently closed during the time I was asked to refrain from showering. My nurse went on to say that my surgeon was very calm about the whole thing and did not seem upset and that if he really thought something were wrong he would have asked me to keep it dry.  Although, all she was saying made complete sense I had been seeing my surgeon for practically a year and had never seen him anything other than completely steady. 

During the entire three years that I had the wound I had only gotten marginally upset about setbacks. This time was completely different. I think it was different because this setback came just after hearing the best news I had ever heard about the wound.  I spent the next couple of days in bed not doing anything, including sleeping. I was entirely too upset to calm down and go to sleep. That made for a very long weekend, while I waited for my Monday nursing visit.  When the nurse arrived she had already been brought up to speed on what had happened and how I was coping (I wasn't). She examined the wound and explained to me that it was really nothing to be that upset about. Shortly thereafter, she figured out that nothing she said was going to help so she showed me another photograph of the wound and then instead of just telling me measurements she actually showed me on a ruler just how small it was. At that point I realized that it was not nearly as much of a problem as I had feared it was.