Aaaaaahhh-Choo-ooowwwwwwwww!

I have heard that bone grafts are the most painful surgery you can get. I'd always assumed that only applied to people who had the bone removed from elsewhere on their body.  I was wrong. Here's a list of things you should never do after getting a bone graft:
1) Sneeze
2) Cough
3) Laugh
4) Shrug
5) Think about your shoulder enough to make it twitch a bit
6) Drop something in front of you and try to catch it with the graft-arm
7) Move, ever
8) Breathe
9) Cry from the pain of the aforementioned motions
I'm pretty sure I did all these things when I woke up from the surgery. It takes time to figure out you don't have an arm to use, so you keep trying to use it until you feel the pain.

I woke up in recovery with the feeling that the bone disease was gone. It was incredible. I could instantly tell the difference. But man was I out of it. I slept a TON and eventually a nurse came over and told me they didn't have a room for me yet, which was why I was still chilling in recovery. I realized it had been a couple hours since surgery already.  Eventually my surgeon came in and was livid that I didn't have a room yet. He basically went out and called the nurses station of where I was headed, demanding a room. He's awesome.

Eventually I started rolling towards my room. It had taken a long time, but I was on my way to a nice, peaceful rest. I'm kind of making this sound like death... I didn't die, I swear. I got to my room with my family in tow. They told me it had been six hours since I rolled into my surgery, and that they were happy I was okay. Apparently they weren't told anything, though how could they be? Recovery wasn't about to call them, or let them in. Oh well. The acute pain services people came in and hooked up a morphine drip. This is the first time I've had one of these, where you hit the button if you're feeling pain. I was super hesitant to use it, but they told me I should because soon I was going to be in a TON more pain. So I did.

It didn't take long to get back to sleep. My family left relatively soon because I was exhausted. So I slept the night away, waking up occasionally to wonder why an older lady kept coming to my door. The next day I woke up and went home early, with a bunch of pills in my pocket.

I was in a sling for a long, long time. I have issues wearing that sling because it hurts my elbow, but I had the block this time so I got to wait a few blissful days until the feeling came back to my arm. I say arm because a couple fingers still had pins and needles or no feeling at all for about a week, which wasn't much help except that it made me think about them all the time on top of thinking about the shoulder. My family was extremely helpful. My boyfriend came in a couple times but he was quite hesitant about the whole thing. He wanted to go to a music store about a week after my surgery and I went because I figured he'd driven all that way to come and see me, so I should make him happy. Things like that were super tiring.

I went back to work relatively quickly.. I think it was a week. My boss told me I could so long as I didn't tell people that they beat me up. Work made me happy, it made me feel normal again. I had so many people in the building tell me about their surgeries, specifically the ones they thought I'd gotten (rotator cuff, dislocated shoulder, etc). I had one professor calling me Gimpy. It was great.

I went back to school about a week after that. School was just starting, and it was my last year. I didn't expect the workload of one of the classes, but to be honest, it was completely worth it. I remember them being so scared when I was able to start taking off my sling for comfort reasons, and to type. But I did that quickly, because I hate typing with one hand.

The worst part of this recovery was the fact that I couldn't drive for six weeks. My cab driver neighbour would take me home after school, and my dad would take me there every morning. This meant that I couldn't stay at school late or go early, and also made me hate needing to depend on other people. But really, who likes having to depend on people, right?

One final thing happened during this time was my ex-boyfriend that kept texting me decided to email me. He told me that the reason he'd been trying to get a hold of me was that he had gotten a diagnosis for asperger's, and that he'd finally realized because of it that he'd treated me badly and wanted to apologize. I read it a few times and realized I could take two paths with this. I could ignore it, just like his texts and attempts to chat, as he'd told me he would be fine with me doing in the email. Or I could respond and talk to him about it. I thought about a lot of things with this, but mostly my mind was stuck on how people treated me when they found out about my health problems. I imagined how I would feel had I sent an equivalent email, and how I would feel if a person ignored me. And finally, I thought about the support system that I was aware of him having and how I thought they would react to this news. In the end, the decision was quite easy. I emailed him back and told him that all was forgiven, and then did my best to give him a few pointers about being diagnosed with a major health issue that I had learned along the way. There are people that I know that still refuse to forgive him and don't understand why I did, but in my opinion there was no question about what needed to be done. I could continue on this thread, but just know that I feel there is no fault in what he did, and I hope that he is able to find help, support, and peace with his own health problems. The rest of his story is his story to tell.

After this happened, I went downstairs to head towards my awaiting neighbour. On my way down, I passed a sign for an information session about a potential employer. Naturally, I tore down every sign I could find and stashed it in my bag... no just kidding. I took a picture of it with my phone and made a mental note to discuss this with my parents. I had no idea about the series events this picture would lead to, but I now know that it was likely one of the most important pictures of my life.