Health update

I mentioned in our last post that recovery from this would be rough. It is. I felt like utter shit after the surgery was done, and for the entire day afterward. Until further notice, we have to breathe through our mouth again, just like poor Sunny had to do for the majority of her life before the split. If you've never had to breathe through only your mouth 24/7 cause of medical conditions, you're lucky. We can at least somewhat use technology again, but for the first two days after the operation, our head was splitting so strongly and eyes straining so hard that just having my eyes open with a tiny bit of sunlight through the window or the TV on caused me to cry uncontrollably. At least the worst of that seems to be gone now, but now it's like we have a perpetual cold. There's still internal swelling in our sinuses, which is very, very painful. Tylenol is our only saving grace because the opioids they prescribed have nasty side effects for us. We know we're supposed to be using our custom light-sensitivity glasses. But since our sinuses are so bloated and full right now, I actually am too afraid to even put them on. I know my body best, and know that if this isn't handled with perfect care, it'll put us in even worse pain.

Additionally, they had given us a "scopolamine patch", which is stuck behind my left ear and is meant to prevent nausea after the surgery (but can't be taken off until tomorrow for some reason). I had one of our best friends look up side effects for it and, unfortunately, a lot of them line up. Halos around lights (granted might be coinciding with us not using the glasses), blurry vision/changes in vision, eye pain, dizziness, lethargy, dry mouth, headache, sore throat. I have all of these after the surgery, but it's also hard to tell how much is from the anesthesia and how much is from this patch thing. Never had one before, didn't know it had side effects. If I'd known, I wouldn't have requested one. It didn't even prevent the nausea.

We have a followup with the surgeon on Thursday, July 3rd. He was very cool, talked to me a bit before we went under, and called me on my phone that evening to check on me, and answered a lot of questions. Overall very great and friendly guy, and apparently he's done this exact surgery a lot before, and yes, it's important to note that there were no complications from the surgery, everything went smooth.

Also, very importantly, Sunny hasn't been out since the surgery because I've decided to take the brunt of all the physical pain for them. This isn't permanent, and things will go back to how they should be as we recover, but we've still got a long way to go. They still want to be out sometimes, but knowing her as well as I do, being put through all this endless pain would just sour their mood even more...

Dog?

TW: Discussion of death and familial bonds

Now for the other part of the title. What's this about a "new dog"?

He has a dog, a big, old, golden dog (I don't know the breed) named Baby. Or, had. You see, he is nearing the end of his life, and, on extremely short notice, called our mother to come adopt his dog. He apparently has no one else to turn to.

I imagine living the way he did - completely alone except for a phone call for 3 hours once a week - must majorly, majorly suck. But we still have to point out that we've never had a relationship with him. In fact, our entire extended family is so distant and rarely communicates that Sunny and I have only ever seen relatives like uncles, aunts, and grandparents, maybe less than 5 times each. We've never been close to anyone outside our immediate family, and those bonds were severed at a young age. But anyway, this means we're very unaffected by our biological uncle's pending death. We have this tinge in the back of our head, like... "this might be the last chance we get to see him and learn what he's like". And we know once he's gone, we'll lose that chance. But there's nothing we can do about it now... especially cause we're recovering from this intense surgery and can barely function at all already, even less so cause our birth mother never agrees to take us places, ie. when I wanted to see our late father's mother (the good grandma) last year, but our mother kept denying us and saying she's too busy, pushing it several months away every time...

But yeah, back on topic. His dog. She arrived at our house just yesterday, the 24th. Sunny and I have a complicated history with dogs. Sunny grew up with paralyzing fear of and hatred for dogs, and avoided them at all costs (and to be fair, she has a point about the dog-obsessed culture in america). I was able to mostly conquer some of our dog-related fears, but we're both still scared to death by barking. A few years ago, our brother pushed and pushed me and our birth mother until she got him a dog from the pound, Jojo, a mixed breed, who was hyperactive and problematic at first but eventually became comfy to live with. Thankfully I can say both Jojo and Baby are quiet dogs and very rarely bark if ever. So far, Baby seems somewhat anxious and always stays in the living room downstairs, barely interacting with anything, yet becoming very excited just from seeing me walk around the house a distance away. She stares intensely, thumps her tail and hind legs fast, and sometimes gets up and walks over, but she doesn't bark or bite, she just kind of brushes up against my leg and looks at what I'm doing. She also slobbers all the time and leaves a noticeable trail of drool everywhere...

What's our thoughts about this? Frankly I feel similar to when our brother first got Jojo. I didn't make the decision to allow it in good faith. My paw was forced because our brother has got his way his whole life by begging and pressuring others (it's a long story) and while Jojo is cool now, I still regret not standing my ground. It had also happened not long after our father passed away, so we weren't even in a good place to consider it. I talked to our birth mother about Baby today. She insisted we weren't excluded from the conversation for any malicious reason, it's because her brother - our uncle - couldn't take care of Baby anymore and had nowhere else to turn. So she took it and only gave us 2 days' notice that she was doing so. I guess I can see where she's coming from, since Baby is important to her brother, and she'll have to say goodbye to him soon anyway (fuck, I don't even want to think about that...) But still, it's hard not to feel like our brother "got away with it again" because now he has two dogs who love him all the time and hang around him all day. So far, the only real problem Baby has caused was, this morning, our brother was asleep in his room, and since it seems like Baby doesn't like going up stairs, she stayed downstairs and howled and cried for like a whole hour constantly. It was maddening.

On the topic of family... Sunny and I have gotten letters from "Uncle Mark & Aunt Diane" since Sunny was very little, but I only got to meet them within the last year or two, once. As usual, our birth mother insists we must remember them from some random time when Sunny was like 5 years old that even she can't remember. I had this plan back in January to send a letter back to their obligatory christmas letter last year, explaining that I'm trans, use a different name now, and hate living with our insane mother... but... well, everything happened, with our health and our wrists and arms and that guy taking office, and now it's almost July. I can at the very least say the brothers of our late father seemed pretty nice and cool, and from what I can gather, the domestic abuse was passed down from our birth mother's side of the family, not our father's.