Here we are again in the same familiar place with me hijacking April’s blog to give an update on what has happened since I left everyone last night. So yesterday April was moved up to what they call a post surgical diet 2 which includes all liquids, some raw fruits, raw veggies, crackers, pudding, and some meats like chicken or turkey. April took it easy only eating a few bites here and there making sure not to overdo it. Later in the evening though, April became extremely nauseated and vomited. She vomited 650ml of fluids and bile. 650ml is quite a bit, over half a liter. The other problem was that she had taken her meds no more than a minute before so most of them came up, but if the nurses can not find the pills or see them they have to assume they stayed in April’s stomach. After this she was only allowed sips of water with her meds. She slept ok through the night usually waking up every two hours or so in pain. So I did our ritual of helping put her in a new position and stuffing pillows in the appropriate areas to keep her back straight.
April is sleeping and my mind is racing. Now that April is well, as in she is alive and is in no current danger, what is next. Next, obviously is healing. The easy part will be her healing from her incisions, the disecting through muscle, the rods and screws being placed in her back, the osteotomies that literally ripped her vertebrae apart to make her spinal column flexible enough to straighten, and all the other normal things associated with Scoliosis surgery and colectomy surgery. The hard part will be learning how to walk again, coping with the mental toll of not being able to use her left leg, not seeing her children, and in general just not knowing what is going to happen in the future. April last saw our two youngest children, Will and Nick, on the 4th of July. We aren’t even sure when she will be discharged from here, and when she is finally discharged April won’t be able to go home, she has to go to a live in rehab facility. So who knows when she will actually be home.
Hey Everyone,
This is Neil once again. I apologize for not posting again until now and leaving everyone hanging. So first things first, April is well.
April’s surgery took almost 2 hours and it was after midnight when the doctor came out and spoke with me. She told me the surgery went great and she had no issues. She also said that the surgery was most definitely warranted. The average cecum is about 4cm in diameter, but April’s on the CT was measuring 9cm. The doctor said that her cecum was quite impressive and even bigger than what the CT showed and it definitely needed to come out because it was getting close to the point of either rupturing or becoming ischemic causing dead bowel. The doctor said she ran her bowel and everything else looked healthy and normal, and that April had plenty of large bowel left so she should not have any issues going forward with nutrient absorption.
This is Neil again. The last time I wrote I left off at April and I waiting for her to get an MRI. Well a lot has happened since then, but I am not going to write about all of that because I only have one thing on my mind. Currently I am writing this in our room at the hospital all alone while April is upstairs having another operation. (scoliosis)
So April has been complaining about abdominal pains for a couple days and she hasn’t been allowed to eat or drink really. Her stomach has been very distended And painful to the touch. Once the MRI was read the Fellow rounded on April and told her the MRI looked great in regards to her spine, but they were concerned about her bowels. He said they were ordering a stat X-ray of her abdomen. The results came back and it looked like she has a large ileus in her bowels, so the doctor wrote orders for her to go to CT stat to get scanned. The CT scan showed she had some very distended bowels, especially her cecum. A colorectal specialist doctor came to see April and told us she has a cecal bascule. A cecal bascule is where the cecum (the beginning of the large intestine) somehow becomes folded over on itself and causes a bowel obstruction. Normally the cecum is about 4cm and April has become distended to 9cm and the only way to fix it is surgery.
Mobile X-ray brought to our room
CT scan
The surgery is called a right hemicolectomy. They are going to make an incision down the middle of her stomach. Eventually dissect down to where the cecum is, pull it up out of her body, along with her other bowels and first inspect all the other bowels for anything wrong, this is called running the bowel. Hopefully nothing else will be wrong and only about 1 foot of her large intestine with be cut out. She will still have about 5 feet left, so best case scenario she won’t have digestive issues, but it is a possibility. They will use a stapler to staple across both sides of the bad bowel, leaving two ends of good bowel that the doctors, in very simple terms, will then sew back together.
So that’s it. I am currently sitting here writing this, but I extremely scared. She has already been through so much. She had an 11 hour, two part major scoliosis surgery with massive blood loss and spinal cord damage. Now this. I really don’t know what to do right now. I am just scared.
CT scan – you can see how distended the bowel is.
