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May 04, 2004
Out of the Woods
After six hours of surgery, Moms is doing OK. She is now talking and breathing on her own. I should say whispering because that's about all she can muster, but she's got a firm grip in her relatively cool hands.
The heart team was on standby, but she didn't need it. A bypass was not necessary because Dr. Bilchik was able to get the lood clot out of the vena cafa inferior where it was. He patched it up.
She has about 1/4 of her liver left, so there was some aggressive scraping going on. Fortunately, as we all know, the liver will regenerate.
If you are going to have cancer, renal is the best to have because it stays relatively isolated from other organs. You have two kidneys. One is enough. Her remaining kidney is producing urine at a goodly level. Cousin K. (M.D.) says she is about 98% on the other side of the danger zone.
Her blood hemoglobin is up to 11. This is tremendous because it was as low as 6 not long ago. When she had her first transfusion it only got up to 9. 14 is normal. Now it seems to be holding steady.
She's in the ICU and off the ventilator - breathing just fine on her own. The machine above her had her at a rate of about 20 and her heart rate was around 118 while we were talking. She presses a little button whenever she needs the drugs and the medicine kicks in. She has a scale of one to ten and is pushing the button about 6 times now. It makes her pretty tired so the conversation has to move on after the clicks.
She's hungry and wants to eat, but she's just on the IV drip. She's also got a big bag of Heparin dripping into her as well. She may be out of ICU as early as tomorrow.
Syl, Pops, Dutz, and I hung out in the cafeteria and had an animated conversation about family and things. It was good to be happy and have our optimism confirmed by reality. What's real is Moms is in good shape, so we haven't had to walk around looking at our shoes, which makes us truly fortunate, considering the things others are suffering in that very hospital.
The next step is finding out what new kinds of services will be available to Moms as she recovers. One promising program is MSSP for which we believe she is elibible. There is also a 'Life Line' service, a kind of granny Lo Jack. I don't think we'll be needing that.
Posted by mbowen at May 4, 2004 09:13 PM
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