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Just wanted to offer a follow-up from 9 months out. Someone messaged me about the rest of my recovery, so I'ma paste here my message to them:
Hey, sorry for the slow response. Just to clarify, first: Dr Friedman was always for the retrosig approach.
Re: my post-op experience, as I wrote in my initial post, the first 12 or so hours just sucked. The walls kept slipping and sliding across my field of vision, and the vomiting was both frequent and projectile.
That said, I started recovering quite quickly. By the time I left the hospital (3 days post-op) I was walking around quite well on my own. My first day out of the hospital, my fit bit informs me that I walked just shy of 10,000 steps — the result of an extended walk to a taqueria near my airbnb. At that point, I was basically fully mobile, and by a week out, I was averaging over 10K steps a day, with the SoCal sun and heat more of a problem than my actual surgical recovery (we were pretty far in from the coast and temps were in the high 90s). By two weeks out, I was regularly walking over 20K steps per day and felt comfortable driving and getting on a bike. Bike riding posed some minor balance issues initially (basically, looking over my shoulder was disorienting), but that faded within the first couple hours of returning to riding.
I probably could have driven a car pretty much as soon as I left the hospital, but my family was around to give me rides and not many places to go, so I played it slow and safe — no need to dance with the devil if I didn't have to. I did experience some mild vertigo occasionally while driving for the first couple-few weeks — but I was basically 100% behind the wheel within, say, 3-4 weeks.
I did physical therapy for a few weeks, which was helpful with keeping my already-quite-limited vertigo in check, but I stopped going before the end-of-run since my symptoms were so mild, and my therapist was clearly running out of stuff to tell me other than 'keep doing the same thing.' That's not meant as a slight to my therapist, who was great. Since then, my vertigo has remained mild, but it does worsen slightly if I spend too much time at my desk (talkin' like 50 or 60 hr weeks) at which point a make a point to get up and about or to resume some of the PT exercises.
I've also started, in the last couple months, to get brief, but occasionally pretty intense headaches if I'm exercising in a way that leads to my blood pressure rising quickly. Deadlifts are pretty much right out, and I image that if I tried to hang upside down it would probably start sucking pretty fast, but I'm a 42 year old man who no longer spends all that much time playing on jungle gyms, so that doesn't really come up very often.
My hearing is pretty much exactly as it was when I went in for surgery (moderate loss in upper registers in one ear), for which I am profoundly grateful. Truly, one of the great wins of my life. I love music and listen to it pretty much constantly. I'm so happy that I can still enjoy (almost) every aspect of it. I did get a hearing aid, and it's helpful, tho I found it rather irritating at first, but if you wear it for a few months, your brain really can adapt to it, tho it can be a cacophonous journey to get there.
All in all, I'm tremendously lucky and deeply grateful — to Drs. Friedman and Schwartz and the whole UCSD team, to my employer for giving me good health insurance and ample time to recover, for my family for supporting me, for my friends for emotional support. My outcomes were basically as good as I could possibly have hoped for. I know that's not true for everyone (especially on the boards here, which understandably tend to foreground people with complications), and I try not to forget how lucky I am or to undervalue the hard work of those who helped me get here.
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