Sponges & Staples

Hi friends...sorry it has taken me so long to post an update since the surgery yesterday. I'm still a rookie blogger. So today's post is about sponges and staples...weird I know...but they are important for different reasons.

Lets start with the sponges. Poor little Al has been on a strict diet since Monday. And by strict diet we mean clear liquids only (broth, water, sprite...more water) and the morning of the surgery she couldn't even have water. You can imagine how thirsty she was yesterday. You'd think we could give her ice chips. Aren’t ice chips the go to thing in hospitals? They are always getting patients ice chips on TV. But alas, Al couldn't even have ice. The one remedy (it seems more cruel to me) is a wet sponge she can put in her mouth to try to satisfy her thirst. I'm not sure if it really helps because it seems to be more of a tease than anything. And this brings us to the next quote from the week..."I'm jones'n for a sponge".

And thankfully Al is making some progress, as she is moving up the food pyramid. Today she had juice and jello. Tomorrow we hope to see some toast coming through that door.

Now for the part that you are really waiting for...staples.

The procedure went well but seemed to last a little longer that we anticipated. One reason it felt so long probably had something to do with the fact that Al went into surgery much later than planned. After speaking with super British surgeon dude last night and again this morning I was able to get further details into the procedure and root cause of all the trouble. When Al had he J-pouch surgery years ago the surgeon used staples to close of the end of her small intestine and then created the pouch. This is all normal... although we found out he did it in a weird way. When Al had her K-pouch surgery last year, super surgeon dude (non-British) noticed the odd shape of the J-pouch and removed the section that wasn't needed and stapled it up. Again, this is totally normal and we can't complain because each pouch has worked great.

But this is where the problem developed. Apparently, one (or more) of these surgical staples was cause of a chronic infection that never went away. The results of these recurring infections were the abscesses. The staples are small and hard to find so it took the surgeon over two hours of searching for the cause to find them. Now the staples are gone and have been replaced with sutures. We hope this is the fix we have been waiting so long for.

The next steps are to let her body take care of any left over infections (now that the root cause is fixed) and heal from the invasive surgery. One hopefully huge step for Al’s recovery.