Our Current State – Pretty Good, Overall

The last week-and-a-half has been eventful. Kay has suffered a horde of complications, some of them scary, some of them undignified, some of them simply annoying, none of them, in the end, terribly dangerous. We never did find out what a temporary colostomy would do to revive the small bowel, mostly because we’d lost interest in the question by the time we had the chance to ask it. Kay tried the liquid tray (I called it the “wet tray” earlier) yesterday morning and kept it down, meaning that whatever organs had been asleep or blocked, they’d now awakened or opened up. She’s since then had four liquid trays and one full liquid tray – the appended adjective meaning that the liquids now include milk: milk instead of juice, cream soup instead of broth. The cream soup may even have had potatoes in it!

Thus we are healing and improving. Kay’s enemies now are a relatively slow and sometimes painful digestion process, despair, and boredom. None of the doctors seem worried by the first, and it is my opinion that her digestion will improve as her GI tract realizes it’s back on the clock. The second is mild, as despair goes, and is due to missing home, wondering when she’ll ever feel normal, and fear that the follow-up procedure will restart the ileus. There’s no real way for me to alleviate this, other than to stay positive, iterate her successes so far, and remind her of the doctor’s assurance that laparoscopic surgeries never result in ilei. I thought that Kay might also benefit from getting out of the hospital, and so suggested a jaunt through the city for half an hour in our car, but our nurse said it wouldn’t be allowed, and one of the doctors disclaimed responsibility, saying only the doctor who had admitted her could ok that. That would be Dr. Hilgers, but we usually only see him in the morning, and it doesn’t seem right to ask our nurse – who said the doctor would not say yes – to ask him for us. We’ll wait until tomorrow, when we’re still likely to be here.