Let the electricity jokes begin

You can call me a lazy blogger if you’d like but that’s not going to prevent me from writing this post in the form of a "listicle." I may be a lazy blogger, but I’m also a tired one. Too tired to think about paragraph breaks and clever segues and transitions or any kind of cohesion altogether. It even gets a generic title: Things Mary Learned About Nerve Stimulator Surgery Today and Other Assorted Bits.

• If you can’t leave a doctor’s office with a few hundred dollars worth of drug samples, a Palm Pilot knockoff is a pretty good substitute, and it’ll last longer than most samples. I’m just sad that its sole purpose is to keep a meticulous daily record of symptoms and meds taken – there goes my plan to finally download and read all those classics I’ve always meant to read. It is, however, an effective alarm clock as it goes off every hour between 6 and 11 p.m. Remind me to never take it into a theater.

• It’s too bad that not all surgeons are as valiant or modest (or sexy) as the actors who play them on TV. I’ve been told that cockiness is a quality you want in a surgeon, which is true considering they’re cutting within millimeters of major nerves and organs and have the power to bring you in and out of any state of consciousness within seconds, but not so true at a cocktail party where you don’t need to be convinced how world class they are.

• For this surgery, they run wires out of my head and tunneled though my neck, and then down, where they’re connected to a battery pack/pulse generator or IPG. Previously, I knew it was going to be implanted in the abdominal area or possibly in my chest, but I learned yesterday that it’s actually implanted somewhere in between, and then back a little ways. Now I have to figure out which side I sleep on so they can put it on the opposite side. The IPG itself is about half the size of a traditional pacemaker. About the best description I can give it is that it’s maybe a tiny bit bigger than a tub of Burt’s Bees lip balm and it’s supposed to last at least five years.

• To me, the most difficult part of this surgery may be that it won’t totally control the pain since it will be stimulating the occipital nerve that causes pain in the back of my head, but not as much in the front, where the majority of my pain is. This could be fixed somewhere in the future when insurance companies start coming around, but until then I have a feeling that the phrase “I need more stimulation” will become the story of my life.

• Aside from my worries about post-op pain and complications, I have one worry that’s incredibly vain, and that is that they’ll need to shave a little more of the back of my head than I was anticipating. It also made me really glad that I’ve been growing it out for the last year and a half. They said it grows back pretty quickly.