Wednesday, January 25, 2012

14 Weeks and bad news, with optimism

Before you panic, I'm officially into 14 weeks now and everything with the baby is fine, as far as I can tell. I still have days that feel like a growth spurt and the other day I had bad nausea in the morning, for once. I think it was mostly because I let myself get too hungry before I started working on breakfast so it passed pretty quickly.

Now for the bad news.  On Monday B had gone to town to get a cup of coffee (he likes the Guatemalan coffee from one of the gas stations in town... I don't argue with him about it lol) and on his way back he swerved to miss a deer and ended up in the ditch, hit a tree, and the car spun around.  Somehow he managed to get out of the car, flag someone down, and use their phone to call me.  Within a couple of hours at the little ER here they were sending him in an ambulance to the big regional hospital in Rapid City because he had lacerated his liver.  Mom and I followed him up and they sent him right to surgery so Mom and I were in the waiting room for a little while.  Not very long, maybe 20 minutes, then we got to talk to the surgeon.  B has 4 broken ribs and the whole right side of his liver was a mess.  It was a grave injury and the Dr. G didn't sound horribly hopeful about it.  He stitched up what he could and packed gauze around the liver to stop the bleeding.  Because of all the swelling, they didn't close him up that day either and he had a large drain running.  He was intubated, with lots of IVs, and heavily sedated for the rest of Monday.  We held our breath the whole time and I couldn't stop crying for more than 15 minutes.  Mom and I went home that evening because there was no way we could sleep with him there, I have to think about Jelly Bean, and we weren't doing him any good sitting there worrying. 

I did get some sleep, but I had to call a couple of times to check on him.  He spiked a 104 fever in the night but had managed to cool him down.  I called his parents as soon as we got to the ICU with him and they panicked at first.  Now they call the ICU to check about as much as I do but they call to check on me too.  They're worried that I'm stressing out too much and putting the baby in danger, which I'm trying very hard not to do, but they're worrying anyway.  They're trying to figure out a way to come up and see him.  They keep asking if I think they should, but all I can say is that B would love to see them and they'd be welcome here, that they could stay with us.  I can't make that decision for them knowing how expensive of a trip it would be.

Yesterday he went in for his second surgery.  The original plan was just to remove the gauze packs and remove the damaged part of the liver, then go back in on Friday and clean everything up.  Good news here, the bleeding had stopped and it was healing well enough that Dr. G left it all for now, and they'll see in a couple of days how it healed up and see if they actually need to remove any dead tissue.  There was a lot less blood to clean up than they expected.  Not out of the woods yet, but all of that is good news.  He was more alert yesterday, if not entirely lucid, so while I was there I was able to communicate with him and figure out what he needed so i could tell the nurses.  The nurses there are amazing people, plain and simple.  They get excited when one of their patients is fighting hard enough to toss them "the finger," it's a sign that the personality is still in there somewhere under the meds.  Overall, B has been a wonderful patient.  He hated the breathing tube, understandably, and they had to tie his hands to the bed so he didn't pull it out, which he hated even more.  They upped his sedation a bit in the late afternoon because he was getting a little too worked up and needed more rest.  He spiked another fever (I don't remember if it was before or after they bumped his sedation up) and it took a little while to get that under control, but it did go down.  Fevers are expected with surgeries and major injuries like this, it's part of the body's defense and repair system, but they just try to keep it low enough to not damage other organs or his brain.

He had a good night last night.  As a result, so did I.  His fever went down a little bit after Mom and I left and he was able to rest well all night.  This morning they took him off of the big breathing tube and installed a port to simplify his IV situation.  I just talked to Mom a little while ago and she said he's chatting and joking and just plain won't nap, which is good to hear.  Sounds like he's his old stubborn silly self, just with pain meds.  :) I've been at work this morning because my boss is out of town until next week but I'm leaving in a few minutes to go be with him.  My BFF S is on a bus across the state to help me maintain some sanity so I'll pick her up this evening.  It's turning out to be a decent day, considering everything we've been thru in the last 60 or so hours.

If he pushes thru recovery the way he has been, he'll be out of ICU in no time and won't have to spend much time in the hospital.  Recovering from broken ribs and major internal injury will take a while but he's a fighter and he has a lot to fight for.  I'd appreciate any warm thoughts/prayers you could offer :)

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