Sunday, April 27, 2008
Home again
| I am home. I arrived around 4:30 this afternoon. It was a busy hectic weekend. I ate a lot of great food and saw a lot of people. The the one person I most hoped to see, Penny, I didn't get to see. Her surgery that had been scheduled for about 10 days ago got postponed. The artery they'd planned on transplating wasn't good enough so they opted to take one from her forearm. That surgery was done Friday. The surgery lasted 12 hours. I have been getting email updates from CA (Carol-Ann) but since I was out of town I had no internet connection. Oddly enough since I was at a computer science banquet, everyone there knew what was going on and filled me in. From CA's Saturday morning update: Dr Ulm finally came out around 1am and talked to us. His words were, things did not go terrifically smooth and they did not go terribly wrong. They fell in between. The vein they took from the arm was not long enough to go from her neck to her brain. There was no other site to get one from. He routed that vein from the vein just in front of your ear to the area of the brain. When he unclamped, the blood flow was not what he wanted. They had to continue to readjust the vein graft for almost 4 hours.Saturday they wound up having to take her back into surgery to deal with the pressure inside her skull from swelling. They wound up having to remove part of the skull. From what I can gather from CA's latest email (5pm today), things are not great but also not bad. So right now, I really don't care too much about Krystals, or big cold drinks and straws and the millions of other petty things I ramble on about here. Right now I am really only concerned with Penny, so I hope you'll forgive me if i stand up and just walk away for a while. |
