Clarification

I feel that I need to clarify something that I misunderstood in an early post while Jennie was in the hospital and that has become somewhat of an issue.

So Jennie has been having some pain similar to the pain she was having prior to the surgery for more than a week now. The pain is not after every meal, but it has been getting more frequent so she e-mailed Dr. Sutherland about it.

He explained that the pain is most likely from her Colon, which has been damaged by the frequent narcotics use over the last several years. Basically her Colon is not working properly at this point, but Dr. Sutherland felt after seeing it in the surgery that there was a good chance it would heal itself as she is able to reduce and hopefully eliminate the narcotics use of the next year. I didn't understand this before, but it does make a lot of sense.

In the e-mail Dr. Sutherland did mention that there was a chance an additional surgery might be required to remove a portion of the colon if it didn't begin to heal itself, so we are praying that won't be necessary.

Little changes

As I returned yesterday I found that not much had changed since I left last week.
Jennie is not sleeping as much this week, and seems to be moving a little bit better, but she still says her pain is at about the same level as last week. I am sure she will begin to show more progress as her body continues to heal over the next few weeks. Her incision also looks much better this week than last week, although her abdomen is still very swollen and sore.

We are still here!

I know it has been several days since I posted last, but we are still here and Jennie is still doing fairly well. She is still very sore and the recovery is not going as quickly as any of us hoped, but there haven't been any big setbacks either. She is still sleeping about 12 hours a day (yesterday was 15 hours), and the incision still hurts when she is awake.

Today I will be going back to Louisville to work this weekend, but will be returning next week on my off days. Hopefully Jennie will have made some more progress by then, but we now see why Dr. Sutherland said it would probably be 6-8 weeks before she was able to do much. We will be at week 4 tomorrow, and I think we are easily 2 weeks away from Jennie being able to walk normally and to reduce the pain medicine much.

We made it!

We made it back into Owensboro late on Wednesday after a long car ride over some pretty rough roads. Needless to say, Jennie was pretty wiped out and we spent much of yesterday just resting and recuperating.

We appreciate all the thoughts and prayers over the last few weeks, but we ask that everyone understand Jennie still has a lot of recovery to do. This was a very major operation and her entire stomach is still trying to heal, so it will likely be several days or even weeks before she feels up to seeing people in great numbers. She will be staying here in Philpot for a while, although I plan to return to Louisville and begin working again probably late next week.

Halfway There!!

So we managed to make it to Rockford, IL yesterday, although Jennie was very sore afterwards. The roads were less than desirable and the bumps made Jennie very uncomfortable. I think that we should be able to make it in 5 or 6 hours today, so we most likely will finish the trip today.

On the road!

Jennie continues to show progress, and her appointment yesterday went well. Dr. Sutherland is pleased with her progress and will be following her progress at home with her doctors in Owensboro and Louisville. He would like to see her back within a year just for a general follow-up, which he likes to do with all his islet cell transplants.

Now that we have that done, we will be hitting the road today. It will be somewhere between 12 and 14 hours, so it will take at least 2 days to make the trip. We will just have to see how well Jennie does with the long hours in the car before we decide about taking a third day. She is still very sore and gets worn out easily, so we will see.

Day 1 out of hospital

Jennie continues to do well today, and got her first good night of sleep since the surgery. We only had to get up for pain medicine 1 time last night, and she was able to sleep for about 10 hours, which I was very impressed to see.

Her blood sugar has been in the low normal range, and she has only had to give herself one unit of short-acting insulin (this is in addition to the long-acting they want her to take every night regardless of where her levels are). I am sure her blood sugar will begin to rise as she eats larger portions and more regularly, but that is why we have to insulin. At this point are more worried about her blood sugar dropping too much overnight than about it getting too high.

We are considering making the trip back three days instead of the two it took to come up here. We are just worried that 7 hours will be too long in the car for Jennie, but we will most likely wait until we start back and see how it goes.