Yuck!

Matthew came out of his procedure with not one, but two drains.  Some of the update below is from earlier today...

Mom talked to Dr. A (the chief surgeon) a little before Mom and Dad swapped at 5pm, and Dad talked to Dr. R (his other surgeon) earlier this evening.

The drainage tube team did a complete CT scan before starting and then did the procedure while he was in a CT machine. The second drain tube was a surprise. I asked Dr. R. about it and even she didn’t know for sure exactly why the second was inserted because the drainage team (a drainage team...yuck!)  hadn't entered their case notes yet. It could have been because they spotted some additional fluid accumulation outside his lungs, or it could have been because the fluid accumulation was so big that they wanted to drain it from both the top and bottom. Dr. R. did say that neither of the drainages looked like what you usually get from around the lungs. And right now the upper drain bag is way ahead of the lower drain bag – 400 ccs to 200 ccs.

Matt is still uncomfortable but is still doing a lot  better than on Monday. His biggest pain issue at the moment

is hic-ups. And this afternoon he finally got a therapist to do a back massage. I had been pushing for that since

Monday. His back muscles were cramping  up so badly that his back hurt as much as his front. But the setup for this is a little weird. The therapists that can do this are actually on the MDA staff, but treating surgery patients is outside their official duties and they do the surgery patients voluntarily when time is available.  I guess we can’t complain to much about that since back massages aren’t routinely part of post-surgical care (or even needed i n most cases).

For the procedure, Matthew was sedated to the max you can be and still be conscious. The relatively high sedation level was necessary in case they had to add a breathing tube (he didn’t need one). Matthew reports that  he had a pretty vivid dream/hallucination  as he was coming out of the procedure. He was in the car and we were driving up here to MDA – but we had some parrots with us! And they were eating worms (or maybe grubs).

The discharge time line depends on how quickly the drainage dries up. They will probably not pull both tubes on the same day, though.

I spoke with my Dad a little while again.  He reported that overall, Matthew seemed to be a bit more comfortable.  However, he was having spikes of pain.  The drainage (I know yuck!) had slowed quite a bit.  My dad said that they pretty much all feel about like the cartoon below.