Recovery Day 1: Too Soon for Wine-Shopping?

I consider Day One as the first full day out of the hospital, which for me was Saturday, November 4^th. With previous experiences with abdominal surgeries, I was surprised at how good I felt. Sure, I needed to nap a couple of times during the day, but I was ready to get out of the house for a bit, since walking upright was not a problem.

The night before, we gave a bottle of wine to my lovely friend who arranged the meal train that would keep us fed for a couple weeks. We noticed that our wine rack was nearly empty and, in a stroke of great timing, our favorite wine store was having a sale. (Note: I can't drink alcohol for a while because of my meds, so I was proposing shopping, not sampling.)

“Hey,” I said to my husband, “I haven’t been for a walk yet today, we need wine, there’s a sale, and near the store there are several restaurants and a grocery store. Let’s go!” I honestly did not think this seemed like too much. We wouldn’t be doing a huge shopping trip and sitting down to eat dinner in a restaurant couldn’t be that much more tiring than sitting on the couch.

On the way to the wine store, my cousin called and we told her what we were doing. I should mention that she's had her own surgical adventures this year. She might have snickered a bit in disbelief at my certainty that what I was doing was perfectly natural right after brain surgery.

Surdyk’s, our wine store, is always crowded on sale days and its well-stocked aisles are relatively narrow. Wine bottles are breakable. Just the day before I had been running into doorways in my own home with the right side of my body  (yay, parietal lobe!). I would have to be very careful. I hugged my right arm to my body and guarded every bottle as if it were the Promised Child or a thermonuclear detonator.

Brian pointed out that we needed more whites. I decided we should grab a Riesling or two, but wandering the familiar aisles, I was not having much luck and started to feel overwhelmed with stimulus overload, something I later learned is a common post-craniotomy reaction. A friendly employee asked if he could help me find anything. Yes, a Riesling.

“Well, the aisles are organized by country and region within country. On one side you’ll find reds, grouped by type, and whites on the other, so you just need to find the country you want and look for a Riesling in that aisle.”

If you have not just had someone poking around in your brain, that probably sounds pretty straightforward. If, however, you still have staples in your head, you will give the employee that flat, slow-blinking look that you probably hold uncomfortably long, and simply say, “Thanks,” while what you want to say is, “What country am I in now? Just point me to a goddamned Riesling! Why are you testing my geography skills?” (I think I turned out to be in Austria or South Africa. I don’t remember whether I actually got a bottle or not.)

By the time we got to the restaurant, I was exhausted and could only eat a few bites of my dinner. We were quick at the grocery store, too, but I was feeling it. Crushed by exhaustion.

A week later, a memory of communication with my cousin percolated up through my healing brain. “Brian, did we have some communication with my cousin about her plans for Christmas this year?”

“Yes, they’re coming the Friday before Christmas, and we may also see them on their way back to Denver.”

“Was that conversation before or after surgery?”

“After.”

“Was I in the hospital still?”

“No, we were in the car on the way to Surdyk’s.”

Lesson for craniotomates: You may think you’re up and able for lots of things, but you will be more out of it than you realize in the early days. If your parietal lobe was at all affected, stay the hell away from expensive, breakable things.