She’s out and among our friends on the 10th floor.
At 3:00 on the nose Dr. Jennings came to give us the post-op report. Exactly four hours from the update that they were beginning. Wow this guy is good.
Everything went quite well. Her ostomy is gone, he was able to ‘save’ almost all of the small bowel that made her ostomy and has reconnected it to her colon. To minimize the invasion of the surgery, he didn’t measure anything but once again told us that she has ‘a fair amount of bowel with good motility.
The connection (anastomosis for you short bowel geeks) is good and he laid all of her bowel in nice, gentle loops in her abdomen to reduce the chances of kinks forming.
Her liver continues to look pink and a tiny bit firm. He also noted that the biopsy needle had a bit of resistance which may be an indication that fibrosis is still there. That isn’t ideal but it is very close to the report from her last biopsy which indicated that no further damage happened as a result of her time on Omegaven. We will wait for the formal report from pathology to see what the final verdict is because the proof in the tissue. We’re sure Dr. Puder will give us a full analysis of what the means as soon as we get the report.
She has a drain in her old ostomy site to let fluid out and reduce infection but other than that, we are ostomy-free.
She is very sleepy by design to let her sleep off the first night but she wakes up every now and then and asks for something familar so she is doing well.
The new game of Short Gut hokey pokey begins now. We don’t know the rules but will learn them as we go.
5 comments:
So glad she is doing well!
We'll be in the Boston area June 16-18 if you guys are up for a visit by then let me know.
Great news!
Bet you're glad that's over - great to hear it went well!!!
Oh, forgot to tell you, check out my latest post, I mention Ellie and asked for prayer requests today for her, if you click on her name it goes right to your site. Hope you don't mind.
I didn't think I'd seen the day when the term "nice, gentle loops" would be used in association with Ellie's bowel. Makes me happy.
Hey, some day when you're sitting on the 10th floor and the girl is sleeping and you're bored, would you do a "before and after" diagram of what Dr. Jennings did today? Just to help us liberal arts majors conceptualize it all?
I've said before and I'll say it again - Go Team Ellie!
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