April 5, 2010

Monday....Oh Monday, how I love you. This is the day that we got some good news and obviously we knew that you would make it....at least for now. They were going to attempt to put the bowel back in, put in a feeding tube and a tracheotomy. We got two out of three. Surgery was scheduled for that morning and we were prepared. The night before, the found him stablel enough to do a CT without contrast. At this point they were not able to assess other damage to his body. The liver was the main problem and thats what we focused on. We had no idea if he had any other broken bones. They were able to do a bedside scan and discovered everything from below the pelvis was fine. No broken bones. With the CT they did find that he had a small break in his back, but nothing to cause any problems. Head was fine, neck was fine, everything was fine...except that tiny break in his back.

Monday he goes for surgery. After a while they come back out, they were able to put in 60% of his bowel, but he was swollen so the other 40% would have to wait. They were able to put in a feeding tube so he could start getting some nutrition and with these feeds, they put in a liver vitamin type of thing that would help his liver regenerate. Remember, he only a little under half of a liver that was damaged and still bleeding a little. Also he was clotting on his own and keeping his blood pressure up. They did tell us that in a year or so he will need a hernia repair because the bowel had been pushed up above his diaphragm, which would make him a little uncomfortable, but it is repariable. Just the fact that they were talking a year later made us realize he was going to do great!

During the surgery they tried to get his out of rhythm heart back into rhythm so they stopped his heart. However, it took four minutes to bring him back, meds and finally the paddles brought him back. His heart was the best thing we had, we couldn't let that go, but it was working overtime. At this time he had over 200 blood products. Whats amazing is he the only person in that hospital to have recieved over 100 blood products and lived longer than 24 hours. The body has a hard time accepting all of this new blood, processing it is a huge deal and with a damaged liver, this was a miracle in itself.

His kidneys were still working well. woohooo for healthy kidneys.

Next starts the process of trying to wake him up a little. Anytime someone has a partial open abdomen they don't allow them to fully wake up until the stomach is closed, but to have them start to respond...how amazing would that be.

Until next time,

Kelly