Totally Disconnected

There's not too much to report on for Friday.  Roberto's chest tube was removed and he's no longer connected to an IV bag.  It's amazing how free Roberto feels to not be connected to so many tubes.  I didn't know this, but apparently the chest tube was sewed onto Roberto somehow?  I wasn't around when the tube was removed, so I didn't see it, but I really don't want to know any more about it.

Roberto will definitely be going home on Saturday!  It'll be so nice to be at home and not at the hospital for a majority of the day (I guess the entire week in Roberto's case). 

I got a glimpse of Roberto's incision, and it's crazy looking!  They closed it up with staples.  Roberto looks all Frankenstein's-imonster-y.  I have a picture of it and I'm hesitant to post it...but why not?  I took this picture on Thursday when Roberto still had his chest tube.  You can see the bandages and such on him.  It's normal for the chest tube stuff to leak. 

Anyway, don't scroll down if you don't want to see the giant incision.



This one is a little worst than the PICC line picture...

By the way, when we asked the surgeon how big the incision was, he indicated that it was 5 inches or so...basically less than what is shown above.  Gaaaaaaahhh, so gross!

Fewer Poking Tubes

Another boring day, which is a good thing!  Thursday was full of removing lines from Roberto's body and receiving plants.  I could probably stop right there; that really is all that happened.

In the hallway and outside the patient rooms are signs asking visitors to be quiet and such.  However, the typo on one of the signs just cracks me up every time I look at it.

hahahahahahaha!  That's such a funny sound!

Roberto is getting stronger everyday.  :)  He went for another walk down the hall today with a physical therapist and I got a front picture of him this time.

They seem to be doing a great job with the pain medicine because Roberto has not been in any pain since getting out of surgery.  I just hope that we can keep that up when he gets home.

Along with walking, Roberto has been doing his breathing exercises with the spirometer.  Roberto has to take a deep breath and get a little plastic piece to a certain height.  The exercises help Roberto's lung and prevent him from getting pneumonia. 

Also, Roberto got a few flowers today!  I got a picture of the first one from the Hendersons.  I forgot to take a picture of the ones from the Fergusons.  :(  Sorry!  It's really great to have some plants in the room.  Also, Roberto loves to be spoiled with gifts.  :P

 Okay, enough with the slide show.  Roberto is getting stronger everyday.  He got a lot of good sleep yesterday because the machines were not as noisy as the ICU ones.  The nurses took out several lines today:  the epidural, the catheter in the bladder, and the central line in his neck.  All that's left is the IV and the chest tube.  I was told that the chest tube will come out tomorrow sometime.

Speaking of tomorrow, it's looking iffy for Roberto to be leaving that day.  Not for lack of progress, just for medical reasons that haven't been explained to me.  Also, they (the resident and nurses) might be just hedging their answer so I don't flip out if Roberto is not released tomorrow.  The definite thing is that Roberto will be home on the weekend and he will be so happy to be home!

I'll be happy, too, because I haven't been getting much sleep for various reasons.  Well, maybe I could stop updating the blog, but that's no fun!  Sleep deprivation has definitely taken its toll, though.  It was definitely a struggle at times to form coherent sentences.  Hopefully, tomorrow make better words.

ICU - No More!

Roberto has been upgraded to the main patient floor of the hospital!  It kinda doesn't feel like an upgrade, though, because the room is smaller and he is definitely sharing it with another person.  The ICU suite was much bigger and Roberto had a neighbor for maybe 1/4th of the time he was there.  Before I get ahead of myself, let me tell you about the other exciting things that happened to Roberto.  

The morning seemed to go pretty well.  Roberto had some breakfast.  Then the nurses moved him into a nice chair so he wasn't just in bed the whole day.  Unfortunately, this made Roberto throw up.  The nurses think it's due to one of the pain medications.  Boo.  :(

The good thing is that throwing up was the only setback of the day!  At some point, a physical therapist came by to get Roberto moving.  After spending several minutes untangling the lines and getting the machines on a movable stand, Roberto, the physical therapist, and the nurse took a short walk around the ICU.  In the picture, you can see them walking down the hall.  Pedro is trailing them in case Roberto felt like throwing up.  The nurse and physical therapist would comment on how fast Roberto was!  For the next couple of days at the hospital, the physical therapist is going to get Roberto strong enough to climb stairs since that's what we have at the townhouse. 

After that walk, the nurse took out Roberto's arterial line that was in his wrist.  This is great because it's one less line sticking out of Roberto's body!  He only has the IV, central line (in his neck), the epidural, the chest tube, and the catheter in the bladder.  That's all. 

If you want to send anything to Roberto at the hospital, you'll have only a couple of days!  The surgeon came by to check on Roberto and was very happy with his progress.  In fact, the surgeon said that Roberto would probably be able to go home on Friday!  Hooray!!!

Alright, I'm actually writing this post near 1:00 am instead of having it scheduled to be posted at 1:00 am.  I'm going to catch some zzz's.

Surgery Recap - Roberto DOES Have Lungs

I'm going back to the old format of writing about the previous day.  For today's post, I'm going to talk about Tuesday - the surgery day.  I know that the two blog posts from yesterday were extensive, but there are some tidbits I didn't include and some things I want to clarify.  The important bits are in between the *** below if you want to skip.

The morning wasn't too bad and went pretty smoothly.  All the pre-operation prep was standard: change into a gown, get an IV, and sign consent forms.  The nurse did sort of mess up inserting the IV, though, and got a bunch of blood over Roberto's gown.  He had to awkwardly change into a new one with a blanket over himself (I'm not sure why the nurse didn't just give him the gown and some privacy).

Then came the anesthesiologist.  While he was talking to Roberto, he said, "I saw in your chart that you were suffering from heartburn.  Is that gone now?"  Roberto said, "I haven't had any heartburn."  The doctor then said, "Okay, I'm going to go talk to a nurse.  I'll be right back."  After a while, I took a peek around the corner and saw the anesthesiologist looking over Roberto's CT scans.  Yeeeah, I guess he looked at the wrong chart?  Well, thank goodness he did that mini-cram session because he definitely needed the proper info about Roberto.  When he came back, he informed us that he'll have to keep Roberto partially awake during the surgery.  If Roberto went too "under" the anesthesia, his lung could collapse and that could lead to death.  Conveniently, even though Roberto would be awake, he would not remember the surgery.

Most of my ramblings from yesterday are probably all you need to know about the 3.5 hours we waited to hear any word about Roberto.  I felt as though I would burst into tears at any moment once we passed the 2 hour mark (the surgeon said the surgery would take only two hours).  Having Pedro and Adam around definitely helped.  I would have probably started bawling as I curled up into a ball on the floor of the waiting room.

******  The Important Bits ******

Okay, this is what the surgeon told me.  The reason why the surgery took so long is because part of the tumor grew from the right, through the middle of Roberto's body (medaistinum) to the left side.  I don't know how much of the tumor this was.  The reason why this was hard to remove is because they made the incision on the right side of Roberto's body.  I imagine it's like reaching for something in the back of a super full freezer; that is probably the worst analogy I could use.

The other complication is that there was a lot of scar tissue from chemotherapy.  The surgeon stated that the chemotherapy was really effective because of all the scar tissue.  You know how a scar forms on your skin?  It's a nice covering the connects all the bits of skin together where there is no skin.  Okay, now think about your internal organs.  They are made to be slippery inside you, because you're a flexible person that might bend in weird ways.  When there is internal scar tissue, slippery internal organs are now connected.  This is what happened to Roberto's tumor and his lung - they got connected via the scar tissue.

The surgeon told me, "I had to remove part of the upper and middle lobe."  Okay, I don't know about you, but that sounded like he removed a chunk of the lung!!!  Thankfully, I saw the surgeon again at night and asked him specifically about how much of the lung he removed.  He said that he "didn't remove that much of the lung" and, in fact, Roberto's entire lung is inflated.  *Whew* and hooray!!

This is super important:  Roberto might need to have radiation later.  It depends on what the pathologists find when they study his tumor.  We'll just cross that road when we need to, which might be next week when we see the surgeon again.

***************************

Roberto has a nice room in the ICU with a window view.  It looks down into an unfinished courtyard of the building, but from Roberto's vantage, he gets to see the pretty sky.  To help rehabilitate his lung, Roberto has to do breathing exercises using a spirometer.  It's like a plastic toy that you blow air into and it moves a plastic bit in a tube.  I'll get a picture.

Also, Roberto has a bunch of tubes sticking in him.  There's the IV, the central line, the chest tube, a catheter for the bladder, and possibly another IV somewhere else?  The chest tube did have disgusting red liquid.  I did not freak out, though, because I was prepared.  Thank you, Lucile!

Unfortunately, the anesthesia made Roberto nauseated (nauseous?) and he's vomited a few times.  It bought us all back to the chemo days, but Roberto said that this made him over come the fear he developed for vomiting.  I guess that's good...?

Okay, the hard part is over.  Time to sleep!