Meeting with the Doctor

Today we met with Dr. Sutherland and discussed the surgery in more length. He believes that this surgery should absolutely fix the remaining pain and digestive issues that Jennie has, and talked briefly with us about several other patients he has had to perform this surgery on after their Pancreatectomy. He also mentioned that he was glad we had not attempted to do the Roux-En-Y back in March along with the Subtotal Colectomy because of the complications we had with that surgery afterwords.

Jennie's surgery is scheduled for Friday morning, and we have to be at the Hospital at 5:30. It will be Dr. Sutherland's first case of the day, which has been the case both other times, and should help to get the surgery started on time. Dr. Sutherland gave us an estimate of 3-4 hours for this surgery, however both of the previous surgeries went well past the estimates we were given, so I expect it to take somewhat longer than that. He also mentioned that he expected this surgery to be pretty difficult, and it is much more involved than the Subtotal Colectomy was in March. This was not very comforting to hear, especially after that surgery ended up having lots more complications than we expected. Jennie's blood work was drawn today as well, and her hemoglobin levels were a little on the low side, so a blood transfusion will most likely be necessary on Friday.

On a side note, today was the first time that they have accessed the Powerport that was put in last month. It was much easier to do once we found a nurse who was familiar with the port, and it only took two attempts which is much better than the 15 tries it took last time.