The road to recovery

I just got home from spending all night at the hospital with Justin and am about to go to sleep, but wanted to post an update about what was going on.

We learned yesterday morning that Justin would not be able to have surgery on Tuesday (today) as we had thought due to when the OR was available, when the surgeon was available, etc. Instead we were told that surgery would be sometime yesterday through Thursday and it would have to be in the evening to work around other surgeries and patient visits that the surgeon had. We were finally told around 1 yesterday afternoon that his surgery would be last night and I quickly made sure that I would have subs for my 3 classes today. Since Justin hadn't had anything to drink (but sips of water) since Friday evening and nothing to eat since Thursday afternoon they didn't want to draw out when the surgery would be. Even though he was receiving vitamins through a pick line, the doctor said that is nothing compared to the nourishment you get from food and they couldn't allow him to eat before performing the surgery since they were cleaning out his system. The longer he went before the surgery, the weaker that was going to make his body, and the longer would be his recovery time.

Justin's surgery began around 7pm and finished up around 9:30pm. When the surgeon came to talk to us afterward (me and Justin's dad) he let us know that the surgery went well and in his words "Justin's colon was very, very sick". We headed back up to Justin's room to wait for him there.

He was brought back to the room just after 11pm and was in an incredible amount of pain. They have him on a morphine pump, but they actually had to increase the amount released with each click by 50% in the middle of the night because Justin was hurting so bad. They gave him other pain meds in addition to the pump as well and although he is still in a lot of pain, he is doing much better this morning than he was last night. Both he and I only slept about 10 - 15 minutes at a time throughout the night so after Justin's dad got back to the hospital this morning, I came home to try to get some sleep and will head back to the hospital this afternoon.

Justin has already starting breathing exercises (to work-out his lungs so he doesn't develop pneumonia) and later today they will have him get up out of bed and move to a chair. Even though moving is quite painful, he will recover much faster the more he is able to move around.

I told Justin this morning that I honestly hope this is the worst birthday of his whole entire life.