Minus one organ...

Sorry for the delay in posting, its been a crazy week to say the least. Josh had his long awaited gall bladder surgery on Tuesday last week. Its been up and down with him since then, mostly down. The surgery was only supposed to take 45 mins and ended up taking 2 hours. The surgeon explained to me that his gall bladder was very inflamed, so it took longer. Once he was in recovery I was able to see him. The first thing he complained about was extreme shoulder pain! We learned that for laparoscopic surgeries they have to inflate your abdomen with gas (and not the kind you can release on your own unfortunately) so they can make room to get out what organ they are needing to remove! Apparently, this gas pushes up your diaphragm and the nerve endings from your diaphragm run up to your right shoulder, hence the shoulder pain. They suck out as much of the gas as they can when they are done with the surgery, but ultimately there is usually some left over and depending on how much is left the patient can experience some pain. Josh is not one to complain about pain and is not one to "milk it", so I knew when he was complaining of this pain it was pretty painful. The pain should only last 24-48 hours, but here we are almost a complete 5 days later and he's still having pain in his shoulder, there is nothing you can do about it, your body just has to absorb it. The pain has lessoned A LOT, but its still there. His other major complaint was nausea which is totally normal after being put under, but his too was lasting longer than it should per the docs, so we attributed that to his pain meds, so on Wednesday we got those switched up. Now as of yesterday, he is complaining of excruciating headaches. Thankfully, Ibuprofen has been able to lesson the pain of those, but it takes a few hours and a lot of sleep before it works. So that puts us to today...he again woke up with a horrible headache and is currently trying to sleep it off. I have asked him not to take any pain meds today to see if it makes a difference in him getting a headache tomorrow morning...I think he's just having bad reactions to the pain meds. Anyway, the "normal" recovery for someone with this surgery is about a week, because of his line of work they have asked he stay out of work for 2 weeks. I'm very thankful for that because with all of his complications I couldn't see him being ready to go back to work by Tuesday at this rate!

Enjoy a few pre-surgery pics of my little patient!





What a hottie!


Haha:


Right before they carted him off!


The morning after!