The Waiting Game

We know now what we knew the last time I reported anything: Kay has a pelvic abscess. It seems to be under control. She has a little plastic drain coming out of her right abdomen, just a tube and a bubble pump that, when squeezed, wants to expand to its natural rotundity and so suctions out what is inside – a translucent brown liquid that is, if I’ve been listening closely enough, a combination of mucus, germs, and a foreign saline pumped in to liquefy the others. The hand grenade, which is what we call the pump for its resemblance to that weapon, hangs pinned to her clothing, transparent to allow for an easy measuring of the poisons extracted. The plan is that the amount will decrease regularly, implying a decrease in the amount available to be pumped, and that the lab will then figure out what the bugs in the brown fluid are and what antibiotics will destroy them.

Our doctors have been very good to us. Dr. Hilgers comes by every day to keep us up to date, even though there has not been much to tell in the past few days. He is always upbeat and always willing to answer the questions he can. There is none of the condescension in him that one sees so often with doctors, though he is always confident, in an understated way. Kay likes him quite a bit, as do I, and all the nurses speak quite highly of him. (This abscess, incidentally, is apparently the third time he’s seen one in twenty-five years of doing this surgery.) The GI surgeon with whom he has been consulting, and who has been very reassuring that they will fix what ails Kay, comes by every two to three days, and a Hungarian doctor from the radiology department (they put in the pump) has come by on a number of occasions to make sure the hand grenade is working well.

The wait comes from Dr. Hilgers and the GI surgeon needing more information to decide whether they want to take the internal bandages out sooner or later. On their own, Gore-Tex bandages are not a problem – they are used because they are non-allergenic, and their use is fairly common, from what we’ve heard. But as an artificial mesh, they are attractive to germs, and once the germs are in the same region, there is a chance they can colonize the Gore-Tex. Once they do that, they will be protected from antibiotics, which can only reach the abscess through the blood stream. The removal of the Gore-Tex is thus desirable, but the surgery to take them out could stir up the infection dangerously. Therefore we play the waiting game: suction and then reduce or destroy the infection with antibiotics, then go in safely to remove the Gore-Tex at a later date. What that later date will be depends, probably, on what the culture turns up and how long the appropriate antibiotics take to destroy it. It will not be more than three to four weeks, we’ve been told.

The problem now is to wait without getting too down. Kay is has been down for the better part of two days, and doesn’t know whether she wants to leave more or be well more – well, she knows she wants to be well. But she doesn’t want to be here for another week or two while it happens. We are able to go outside, but Kay is confined by doctor’s orders to the hospital grounds. There is some talk of her going home with the grenade – either to the hotel or really back home – then coming back for the Gore-Tex-removal surgery, but until they know what kind of bug or bugs she is fighting, they don’t want to let her go. Ultimately, we just want her to get better, and we’ll do whatever they want us to do to make sure that happens.