What's with the slacking?

I haven't been posting much on the ole' blog this year. We've been pretty busy, and so far 2010 hasn't been great. But hopefully the rest of the year will be much better. And we've definitely had worse for sure! Thankfully, Sofie has been doing really well, for the most part. We started out the year with colds and coughs and sore throats, etc. When Sofie has a cold she doesn't eat well at all, and that's a big battle considering her past problems with feeding.

For the first 6 weeks we battled colds and such. Once that was finally over, Kenny and I got food poisoning. Actually I got it twice before we figured out what the culprit was - a bad batch of milk. Thankfully Sofie didn't have any of our milk! Neither one of us had ever had food poisoning before. We always seemed to have stomachs of steal, especially Kenny. But, wow, we were sicker than dogs with this. At least we took turns getting it and didn't both have it at the same time. And I can't imagine how bad it would have been if Sofie had gotten it, so I was more than happy to take a second turn in her place.

After all that, things were looking up. Then Kenny must have thought we were being too boring. He decided to put a little pizazz back in our lives by having two - yeah TWO - emergency surgeries within 8 days of each other. Not cool dude. You're running out of nonvital organs to give up for Lent.

The first surgery was on Friday, the 19th. I was out with some friends on Thursday night, and Kenny was home with Sofie having a gallbladder attack. Guess who was having more fun? He started trying to call me a couple of hours into it, but I didn't hear my phone ringing for another hour after that. Yikes! I felt so bad!!

I suspected he'd had a gallbladder attack about a year and a half ago one night, but they never did diagnose it in the ER. He hadn't had any more problems since then. But when I finally got his messages that night I figured that's what was happening again. My friend, Natalie, followed me home and stayed with Sofie while I took Kenny to the ER. Thanks, Nat!!!

After a few very excruciating hours in the ER, and his labs had all come back normal, we were waiting for an ultrasound. He was still in a lot of pain, but tough guy that he is, wanted to go home so he could still go to work on Friday. Uh, yeah. Finally he had an ultrasound, and his gallbladder looked so bad, the surgeon decided he had to stay and have it out immediately. Usually with a bad gallbladder they send you home and you schedule your surgery to have it out in a couple of weeks or so. So this was bad. And he wanted to go to work. Yeah, he didn't. He had surgery instead.

They said it would take an hour or so, but 2 1/2 hours later his surgeon (who's done a couple thousand of these) came out and said he's only seen a handful that looked as bad as his. He couldn't believe Kenny hadn't been complaining of pain for a long time. He had to stay in the hospital for three days, and then came home that Sunday afternoon and was back at work on Tuesday.

He was recovering really well. His pain was slowly improving, no fever, everything else returning to normal, etc. Well enough to stay home by himself with Sofie Friday night while I worked. I was sleeping Saturday morning after work when I heard him come upstairs in major distress. He was really pale and sweating and in really horrible pain, worse than any pain he'd had with his gallbladder attack. He said he felt like something had suddenly exploded, and he was burning everywhere inside.

I've never seen him like this before, and I was immediately worried that a) he was bleeding out somewhere internally from his surgery, or b) had an abscess (pocket of infection) that had ruptured, or c) had acute pancreatitis, which can happen after gallbladder removal, and can be extremely serious.

After taking a minute to throw on pants and shoes and decide between driving and calling an ambulance, I threw us all in the car and flew to the ER (we have three ER's within 2 minutes of our house). We were there within 10-15 minutes of onset of his symptoms. For the next 4 1/4 hours he remained in the worst pain of his life, while we were treated horribly by the ER staff. I know, as a nurse, there are a lot of whiney, annoying, crazy drug-seekers out there. And as a caregiver you may think that all you like, but it's never appropriate to treat someone that way. I'm appalled at the care, or lack thereof he received in the ER. Twice, I had to leave his side to make someone come help him.

Finally they realized we weren't crazy, and his appendix needed to come out immediately. So he went to the OR for the second time in 8 days. Not only was he in horrible pain because he had a very infected appendix that was close to rupturing, but his pain was intensified since he had just had his gallbladder removed a few days before. For that reason they couldn't remove his appendix laproscopically, but had to do an open appendectomy instead. When they opened him up, they found a third reason for his excruciating pain - bile flowed out of his incision. Apparently he also had a bile leak following his cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal). More than half a liter of bile had been sitting freely in his abdomen for the past week. Triple ouch.

Monday morning he had a HIDA scan to see if his bile leak was still active. Thankfully it didn't look like he was leaking any more bile, and they had rinsed and suctioned out most of the bile that had been in there during his appendectomy. The rest of it seemed to be reabsorbing, and he was healing and starting to feel better.

He was able to come home today, and is doing much better, but obviously still in quite a bit of pain. He was able to keep his sense of humor throughout most of this though. He told me he was giving up his gallbladder for Lent last week. This week he said he was also giving up his appendix. Overachiever. He also said it's nice when your organs almost explode on a Friday or a Saturday. That way, you don't miss as much work. Haha. He'll be here all week folks!

We have the best friends and family. We had so many offers of help from everyone, and our family came right away and stayed to help take care of Sofie. We love you guys! But seriously, we all seem to meet up and hang out in OR waiting rooms entirely too much. There are these things called family BBQs that normal people have. I think we should try those instead. We shouldn't all be able to rank the hospital cafeterias in town. It's not normal.