When you go in the day of your surgery, one of the first things they do once your IV is hooked up is give you a heparin shot. Heparin is an anticoagulant...in layman's terms, they want to prevent blood clots, so they give you a blood thinner. The kicker is the administer the shots in your belly. Freaky, right? This continues every 8 hours while you're in the hospital.
Once you are discharged, one of your prescriptions is for...you guessed it, another blood thinner. This one is called Lovenox, and is only required once a day. I knew this ahead of time, and asked Goob (my husband) if he would be comfortable giving me the shots. He said sure, he gave shots to cows growing up on the farm, what's the difference. Uh, only that I'm not a cow, jackass...but I digress.
True to his word, he gave me the shots, which was good because there was no way I could have done it to myself. It didn't hurt, but just the thought of a needle in my belly made my heart race and my body stiffen up. We had to do these shots for 5 days. He only hurt me once, and that was the night he was trying to "do it quick". Why, I don't know. But if you go through this, don't be surprised if you bruise in the area of the shots. My belly was a roadmap of bruises, both from the shots and from the incisions.
Now, why am I telling you all of this, you might be asking....well, here's why: if you are going to have the surgery and your doc tells you you need the shots, check with your insurance company beforehand to make sure there is no problem. Come to find out my company needed a preauthorization, and we were told that since we didn't have one, the "request" would have to go before a review board, which would take 2 days or more. I didn't have 2 days to wait. So the next morning I had to call the doc's office, and they took care of it for me. They called the insurance company and got the preauthorization, and it was all back to neat. But to spare yourself the irritation, look into it ahead of time.
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