Morning of Day 5

WOW. It's hard to believe it's already Day 5. TIme is going by so fast. I think that I'm just reacting to every little symptom I feel out of sheer panic after living with Graves and all the wonderful symptoms I experienced the last year. I took my synthroid this morning at 25 mcg... I know such a wee dose and I may pay for it a month from now... if all goes well with my symptoms today, then I'll increase to 50 mcg again tomorrow and on Tuesday when I have my post op follow up, the surgeon will increase it accordingly to my weight or we may slowly increase week by week. I noticed that today I can feel some actual pain at the site. The only real pain I've had up to this point was the sore throat I could feel which was probably from the breathing tube. My pain never reached over 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. I never did need any pain meds. Although, now that i remember, upon waking up from the surgery, the nurse gave me a dose of Dilaudid in my IV for pain and that was the only time I ever had anything for pain. I've iced the site since Day 1 and yesterday, decided to let up on icing a bit... and started to just ice for 30 minutes and no ice for an hour or two. Up til last night, then I decided to try to sleep thru the night without ice. Now, I'm wondering if that was an error as i can see the site has swelled slightly (around the incision) so I'll be icing today to see if it makes a difference. I'm wondering if it is due to me extending my neck upwards in my sleep. I kept having crazy dreams that required me to look up and then I'd wake up due to the pain I felt if I extended my neck too far. I did read somewhere online that stretching the neck by moving it from side to side frequently and up and down with as much as comfort as tolerated is good and will help stretch the incision and/or scar tissue so that it won't be so tight and rub against the windpipe later down the road. So, I'm stretching :) It feels SO darn tight around my neck. I described to my husband by having him put one hand on each side of his head just below his ears and told him to pull down til he felt a tugging feeling on his ears. And then told him imagine a feeling of duck tape across the bottom of the front of your neck.... he didn't like that feeling but that is exactly how it feels. Very tight and nothing I can do... It's not like I can loosen it, or remove the tape to relieve the tightness. I expected the tightness though as my surgeon did say that she cut 2 mm to open me up and then trimmed the skin nicely before closing me up so she had to stretch my skin a little to close it up. She was very concerned about a scar as my thyroid sat a little high so she couldn't cut in a crease. Overall, I feel okay. I think at this point.... anxiety is the worse feeling I'm experiencing. Sometimes, I think I'm just waiting to feel something wrong... and I have to remind myself that my thyroid is now gone and I'm on a different path now. Will post pics either later today or tomorrow sometime as I have taken them from before to right after surgery and each day thru now.