It has been a month since the free-flap surgery -- Amazing!

I got a lot of advice about post-op care at home by PM from trimatt -- It was good to have my adult children here to help; I did everything myself, of course, but it was nice to have backup just in case and easier to have someone drive me instead of driving myself.

Just got back from visit to the nurse practitioner -- She picked out a lot of sutures from my forearm and that is healing very well. The trach hole finally closed on the inside, so now just a band-aid there -- Need to get some cool ones.

One thing I forgot to mention about hospital stay was that they had a set of random auto-inflating cuffs on my lower legs to keep circulation going good while sitting/sleeping in the bed -- Good idea.

The whole hospital stay was made much better by the various nursing and support staff -- What a friendly bunch of folks EXCEPT when one wakes up from dozing and finds a Physical Torturist has entered the room -- I get that 'trapped in the dungeon' feeling, right down to the guy in the black mask with his box of 'tools'.

Some time back, I found plastic flies by the gross on EBay and ordered some, sharing with my son who is a special ed teacher in Chicago. Of course, I took some into the hospital and had some fun -- I would stick one up a nostril, as if it was crawling out, and when the next person came in, I would complain that I was having some very fierce itching -- Some of the reactions were priceless! One of the PT ladies even brought me a plastic spider (from the PT dungeon in the back rooms, I guess).

I still have some speech and swallowing therapy to go, but first the swelling of my tongue and throat has to go down -- Can be as long as eight weeks after the surgery. Having problem right now with several days of diarrhea -- Nurse said it might be lower bowel infection from messing around with all the anti-biotics or it might be that the food brand (Novartis at home; Jevity in hospital) and I don't get along. Have to bring specimen in for testing.

Talked to nurse practitioner about PEG tube size differences and she said that if I wanted, they could replace my current PEG with one with larger diameter tube.