The tubes are back

This is Brian with another update on Wendi. Her port-a-cath was removed on Sunday. However, just when we thought she would be able to go home on Monday or Tuesday (as in today or tomorrow), yet another complication developed. This time it was her bladder; it started leaking internally. The doctors were checking for that before; why it never presented itself as a problem until now... we're not sure. At any rate, her doctor ordered an emergency procedure to have both the nephrostomy tubes put back in. I'm sure they will be there for several weeks while the bladder heals. (The lower abdominal drainage tube is still out, though; it does not need to be put back in.) I hate to see her come home with all those tubes, since the nephrostomy tubes in particular make it harder for her to sleep comfortably and limit her ability to move around. However, we will have to live with such drawbacks, since we only want her coming home from the hospital once — not going back in multiple times to deal with more complications.

Right now, the main things that are keeping her from going home are the staph infection and the bladder leakage issue. I'm sure they'll want to run a few more scans, tests or whatever, but to me it looks like everything that can be done to mitigate the bladder situation has been done. At this point, her body just has to heal the damage, presumably over several weeks. The staph infection is a very serious complication, though; that has to be brought completely under control before she can even hope to be discharged from the hospital. Since she had to get the nephrostomy procedure the other day, I'm sure that messed up the doctors' ability to give her antibiotics, so that will probably delay her treatment to some degree. We're keeping our fingers crossed to see her come home sometime this week, but for lack of a more sophisticated term, we just don't know right now.

Wendi has been in the hospital since September 15. The recovery period was originally intended to be 5-7 days, but obviously the various complications have delayed that. Tuesday (tomorrow) will mark her third week in the hospital. She has only gone outside once during that entire time. Hopefully we can start taking her outside more often while she recovers. She wasn't up for it on Sunday... probably too groggy from the anesthetic she received during the port-a-cath removal and the nephrostomy procedure. We haven't heard about any MRI results; we expect to hear more this coming week.