Post-Op: Day 12

    Gee, but it's good to be back home, even though everywhere I look, there are things I want to clean, weed or rearrange, but can't. In the meantime, Monica has decided to thin out my wardrobe while she has the energy advantage. "Strike while the iron is weak," she told a phone caller.
    But the pleasures of home have not been without other complications, as well. Not with the basics, thank God. The urostomy is working fine. The 17 stairs to the second-floor bedroom? Not an obstacle. What to wear? T-shirts and sweatpants with elastic waistbands. No, the complications came up elsewhere:
    1. That sore left foot (Monica's diagnosis: plantar fasciitis), which inhibits walking as much as I should.
    2. Constipation (I'll resist dwelling on the delights of strawberry Milk of Magnesia).
    3. The leaky incision just left of my navel, which put Monica's talents as a teenage candy-striper to the test. To soak a succession of T-shirts, bandages, towels and improvised plastic barriers she deployed, it generally took two hours or less.
    And 4. Surprise! Low blood pressure, by-product of the switch from hospital blood pressure meds to the stronger ones at home. The visiting nurse took a reading Friday and it was fine. Had it been checked after that, I might have guessed why I felt so light-headed and listless.
    It was health proxy Bill Finkelstein's alarm at Monica's last-gasp leak treatment -- an Ace bandage around my waist with a towel tucked inside it, on top of the usual little taped-down pile of gauze -- that prompted the phone calls which took us back to Roswell Park Cancer Institute Saturday evening, to the ward I left 48 hours earlier, Seven West. One of Dr. Guru's associates, Dr. Syed, agreed to meet us there around 8 p.m.
    His solution -- a small urostomy bag to fit over the leaking incision. While we waited for one to arrive, I asked for a blood pressure reading. When it came up 71/52 and 72/51, the health care aide thought the computerized testing machine was malfunctioning, but an old-fashioned pump-up cuff yielded the same results. A few laps around the ward lifted it to 90/62.
    Meanwhile, the bag worked. Thank you, Dr. Syed. Once in place, it immediately started filling. And today, Sunday, the seepage seems to have stopped entirely. As for blood pressure, now that my blood pressure cuff at home has been located, the readings are improving, but they're still low. No more pills till they climb some more.