Post surgery

Hiya I am so glad everything has gone well and wish u,  your husband and family the best for the future.

I had full nephrectomy just over a year ago. 

Your husbands recovery will depend on him. Sounds like my husband always doing. Well he will have to slow right down haha...

The best to start off small and slowly. So say, start with 10 min walk,  then slowly make it 15mins etc ...be guided by your body...

I do tend to tire easily...but i rest...frustrating as it is I  can do an hour of stuff then have to rest. I tried pushing through, but for me it knocks me back..but I do have other medical issues.

But we are all different. Tell him to listen to his body and don't rush things.

Hugs and love for the future

Hi!

Glad to hear all went well. I had my partial on 1st  April so I'm currently about a week and a half in.

Like your husband, I am very active. I am 64 but work five days a week in a local village shop and rarely sit down, whether at work or elsewhere during the day. I have two dogs and they get bored after about three hours indoors so off we go for a walk again!!

That's my normal. So now, being told I shouldn't drive for up to 6 weeks (and I am 5 miles from the nearest town so once my freezer stocks are depleted I am going to have to figure out how to get in food) I am a tad frustrated. I am perfectly happy being told I cannot go to work for six weeks!! - there are three of us there who tend to end up "carrying" the other three, one of whom is a 20-something who is the laziest lad I've ever met!, and tbh not having to haul stock out of the stockroom onto shelves whilst he stands there on his phone, is the best gift I could have been given post-surgery!! - but it's the other activity I am used to, the dog walks, the popping down to the garden centre or Aldi or the farm for my eggs, or farmer's market, or to the beach with the Girls, that I cannot maybe do for up to 6 weeks and I am not a happy bunny as it goes against my normal, to not walk far or not drive. But I'm trying to be patient as I have a big drive to France coming up in early July and I don't want to compromise that by not healing enough at this end of things. 

Nobody has told me if my first follow-up is 4 weeks or 6 weeks. If 4 weeks, I will be able to chat with the consultant and nurse a lot sooner and presumably get scanned to see how well it's healing inside. (My outside is doing pretty well now apart from swelling still in the incision area which might be because I walked too much too soon!) If it's 6 weeks, I dare not drive until then unless I can get a direct line through to my very busy consultant and he can categorically tell me that in his opinion what he has done inside me will be healed enough before the 6 weeks. 

So I really feel for your husband, believe me!! I have read that sometimes you can get a hernia by exercising too much too soon, or you can fail to heal completely inside and so risk having pain or the wrong kind of adhesions for a long time after. I think this is only a risk, not in every case, but for the sake of a couple of weeks "Lockdown" I am going to have to not take that risk, I have decided. I didn't get a Lockdown at all five years ago as I was working two key worker jobs at the time, so I am trying to view this as my chance for a Lockdown like everyone else had, where I can sit in my garden with my dogs and read and enjoy the sunshine when it comes (which is current, but it's due to rain again next week but then may revert to Summer again after that).

I have been eating very healthily for around two years now anyway, and wasn't doing too badly even in the years before that. I am on board with the UPF debate and my UPF intake is now around 30% of my diet at a guess, whilst most UK adults apparently have a 60% UPF diet. Most of my calories come from loads of frozen and sometimes fresh vegetables and fresh fruit, and strictly moderate portions of natural (not low-fat) things such as Greek yogurt, milk, cheese, and very few carbs. (Don't really like bread, and I eat very little pasta and potato) I wish I'd known more about diet when I was in my 20s as I was still knocking back the ready meals and the pot noodles in those days, but people were less informed 40 years ago, we had no internet, and junk food was starting to pop up on most street corners in the big towns at least. 

A healthy diet and healthy exercise (once your husband can get back to his normal active self of course) is probably going to be the best thing to promote his long term recovery and for all we know, may even go a long way to preventing recurrences of cancer in the future. I'm not sure anyone has done research on that aspect yet. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, as him to hang in there as there is a "lady of a certain age" sitting here knowing pretty much exactly how he feels to have had to suddenly drop activity level tenfold!!! It's only a blip, and the future is now bright.

I haven't had the night sweats. I had that a bit in menopause (only symptom I had really) but it was lovely because at the time I was living without central heating, in Yorkshire, and with the snow on the ground or ice or frost and a below-zero temperature, I used to wake up beautifully toasty warm for months on end and didn't even need an electric fire on during the day either!

I haven't really been feeling tired since the first couple of days home. Soreness is going off now. We are indeed all different and it did occur to me that perhaps your husband actually does have a mild flu? I think surgery can reduce one's immune system temporarily, so perhaps he has picked up a fluey bug in the hospital? which could also be causing his sweats. 

Re follow up with consultant...just ring your consultants secretary and ask when date might be...

That crossed my mind but I decided to leave it until Monday to have a good chance of reaching someone. I did email my kidney nurse two or three days ago and she might have replied by Monday anyway, but as it's school holidays I'm not pushing for info because half the world seems to have ground to a halt because it's two weeks off school and they all have children to entertain! (Having the same problem this week with en route stopovers we are trying to book for the French trip in July - at best they are WFH and at worst they have taken time off for school holidays!)